For anyone born after Y2K, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when game hints, mission walkthroughs, and every other bit of “secret” information about a game wasn’t readily available via a quick web search. Although strategy guides linger on, they’re hardly the indispensable game companions that they once were in the days before the internet was ubiquitous in our lives.
Let me take you back. Back to a time in the early ‘90s when a twelve-year-old boy and his younger brothers might be set loose to wander the shelves of a Barnes & Noble store while their parents enjoyed an hour or two of relative peace as they sipped mochas in the café. While his brothers disappeared into the aisles loaded with comic books or the latest New Hardy Boys novels, our tween protagonist found himself in the game guides section. Although he might have been looking for a book on programming games in BASIC, what he found calling to him was a large novel carefully disguised as a strategy guide. The future history of the Terran – Kilrathi War, the Wing Commander I & II Strategy Guide.
Over the course of a few vacation visits, I read that guide cover to cover. It introduced me to space combat sims even before I got access to a PC that could run Wing Commander. When that happened, Wing Commander became the most played game on my grandfather’s Compaq 386 – my brothers and I would rotate through missions, challenge each other to see who could get the most kills in a campaign playthrough, and try to inventively speedrun through the game in the days before speedrunning was a thing.
And it was all because of this strategy guide. A lot of strategy guides back then went the extra mile of not only being an essential game companion, but also weaving in a retelling of the game’s story in novelized form. The X-Wing and TIE Fighter guides were even considered Expanded Universe canon before Disney and Kathleen Kennedy blew it all up. The Wing Commander guide told the story of our heroic pilot – Christopher “Maverick” Blair – and featured a nice amount of in-game and concept art to go with the various strategies.
Long-time readers of this blog will correctly realize that my attempt to narratively retell my own Wing Commander replay and X-Wing series pilot reports were inspired by that old strategy guide style.by
Interestingly enough, modern strategy guides seem to be moving back towards the bespoke approach of the old guides. A quick perusal of Amazon’s recently published strategy guides shows a bunch of nice hardcover coffee-table sized “strategy guide” companion books for popular games. These modern guides feature concept art, backstory lore, and tend to command enthusiast level prices. In a day when the answer to “how do I beat this level’s boss” is a YouTube video away, and most games are just digital downloads, it seems that fans still want something tangible to display from their new favorite games.