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We really miss physical game manuals. There was always a particular kind of joy that came from opening the box of a brand new video game and flicking through the pages of a manual to find out what the game was going to be like. Some of our favourites would get dog-eared, and torn up, but they were always well-loved by us!
One Twitch streamer and archivist understands the joy and importance of old video game manuals and has gone out of their way to archive every single Super Nintendo manual in English online, VGC has reported. Peebs, an SNES streamer-turned archivist, realised through streaming that there wasn’t a one-stop shop for SNES fans to find all of their favourite manuals that they might be missing. So they embarked on a long, eight-year quest to find every single manual and get it archived online for everyone to see.
And, on 1st July, Peebs uploaded the manual for 90 Minutes European Prime Goal, the final English SNES manual he was missing from the website.
The archive contains 844 English-language manuals for the Super Nintendo. That means everything from classics like Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, and Super Metroid, to more-unusual games like Marko’s Magic Football, Revolution X and Tin Star have their paperwork (literally!) all uploaded in one handy place.
It’s a total delight just to skim through here and see how each manual was laid out, from the artwork used to the colours and the font, and also just to see how Nintendo (or other publishers) explained their games to the world.
Sure, you can read all of the manuals for every SNES game on the Nintendo Switch Online service, but because these are often manual scans from other people, you can see everything from the creases to the tears on them. They look just like we remember them!
The team helping Peebs out includes the likes of Arachness, BuffaloJoe, Timber, SNES Central, and Grant Kirkhart. But the group won’t be stopping there, as they have also started collecting and archiving Super Famicom, N64, and Virtual Boy manuals. Phew! We wish them the best of luck in uncovering everything.
You can access the archive right here — though you may need to try in a different browser as the website is not available on https (thank you to readers who flagged this to us!).
Now, don’t mind us, we’re just getting giddy and nostalgic and remembering how much time we spent sitting on the carpet, reading video game manuals, then spending hours and hours playing A Link to the Past.
Further reading:
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