How Gamefaqs changed RPG consumption - an history of RPG walkthroughs, from clue books and hearsay to the digital age
Writing about the history of videogame RPGs doesn’t just mean discussing titles, franchises, developers and game design trends, but also their audience and how the way they engaged with this genre changed over the years as society slowly transitioned from mostly analog interactions to a growing dominance of the digital space.
For instance, the meteoric rise of Gamefaqs, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, marked a seismic shift in how English-speaking videogame enthusiasts experienced this medium, especially for genres like RPGs with their high level of ludic and narrative complexity, complex dungeons, obscure event triggers and abundance of multiple scenarios and different endings.
Back in November 1995, when Jeff Veasey created what was then known as the Videogame FAQ Archive, this new site was actually a rather simple clone of a previous FTP archive of fanmade walkthroughs that no one would have expected it to become a pillar of videogame consumption for decades to come. While its ease of use and democratized approach to videogame content slowly gave it an edge, in fact it took a number of years for Gamefaqs to transition from an AOL-hosted passion project with a very simple layout to Veasey’s full time job, integrating a variety of features, support for different web interfaces, a search function, multiple restylings and, crucially, the 1999 introductions of game-specific message boards, later giving way to site-wide initiatives such as polls and game and character contests while also partnering with a variety of companies, from IGN to CNet, which ended up acquiring Gamefaqs and integrating it with Gamespot and, later, Fandom.
-ANALOG GUIDES, FROM CLUE BOOKS TO GUIDEBOOKS
Of course, to understand Gamefaqs’ disruptive role in this space, we also need to discuss how the world of videogame tips and guides back then was still mostly anchored to the analog space, with the internet still being uncharted territory for mass consumers and what little dedicated web space that did exist being extremely niche and, sometimes, quite hard to find. From the ‘80s to the mid ‘90s, videogame enthusiasts had to find information about the games they wanted to discover in a variety of ways, with RPG developers themselves outsourcing walkthroughs for their own titles or writing them directly, thus turning them into a small additional revenue stream.
Mail-order clue books were an early example of this situation, with players directly contacting a game’s publisher or developer thanks to the info provided in the manual and buying what often amounted to a curious mix of strategy guide, novelization and development commentary.
For instance, Richard Garriot’s Origin Software provided plenty of clue books for their Ultima games, but with Ultima VI’s cluebook they chose to spice things up a bit by presenting it as a letter written by two NPCs to the Avatar, the series’ protagonist, detailing the world’s situation while also providing plenty of lore tidbits like a dissertation on the language and writing used by the Gargoyles, which are initially presented as the main antagonists.
Of course, this was also true for a number of Western publishers of Japanese RPGs, with Victor Ireland’s Working Design perfecting this craft to an unusual degree and turning a number of its later guidebooks, like the one covering the first two games in the Arc the Lad Collection on PS1, into some of the most beautiful volumes ever crafted in this unique subgenre. Some of Working Design’s guides included their own trademark snarky commentary, including hints at the core design traits that likely inspired the changes they made to the titles they localized.
Speaking of changes, over the years some have suspected that the way Working Design amped up the difficulty of the games they brought to the North American markets, sometimes also changing the placement of items and triggers compared to the original versions, could also be related to their side business as purveyors of strategy guides, even if this is obviously something that only those directly involved could confirm.
Even in Japan, the growing popularity of guidebooks by publishers like ASCII, later Enterbrain, which in the late ‘90s often had their own aisle in local videogame shops, may have also influenced a number of development choices, like the introduction of secret characters, events or endings in order to make tips and strategy guides more alluring, with developers like Idea Factory later on pushing this design space to its limit with their Neverland franchise.
Famitsu, the all-important Japanese videogame magazine which spawned a number of other publications over the years, also had its own brand of guidebooks, with an unsurprising focus on RPGs, especially intricate ones. Intelligent System’s Fire Emblem Thracia 776, for instance, got a rather popular Perfect Guide book despite its extremely late release in Super Famicom’s lyfe cycle and relatively weak sales simply because of how hard it was and of its complex maps and missions.
There were also a number of interesting, if sporadic, hybrid efforts aimed at making strategy guides into cross-media efforts, like with BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate II getting an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons regional module penned by Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood himself, as part of the line of guidebooks written in-universe by legendary wizard and traveller Volothamp Geddarm.
This happened to be quite a bizarre release, since this “Guide to Baldur’s Gate II”, which could have been easily mistook as a strategy guide for the game itself, didn’t cover the actual contents of Baldur’s Gate II, nor was it related to the city of Baldur’s Gate which wasn’t even included in that game, but was actually a curious oddity aimed at fans of the videogame RPG interested in using its setting, Athkatla and its environs for their own tabletop AD&D campaigns, with Volo providing plenty of colorful information like his reviews of the region’s best taverns, Michelin-style.
-MANUALS, BETWEEN ART, TIPS AND… COPY PROTECTION
Then, of course, you had the manuals themselves: Western CRPGs, same as many Japanese home PC RPGs, often came bundled with expansive manuals modeled after tabletop RPG rulebooks, outlinining the systems, spells, characters, lore and setting of any given game, sometimes with multiple booklets depending on the subject, for instance splitting the gameplay and lore parts. In a number of instances, especially with early CRPGs, manuals were also used as an anti-piracy system, asking the player to copy passwords or even sentences or words taken from any given page in order to get through certain events.
Even during the console age, Super Nintendo RPGs often made their manuals into irreplaceable parts of the experience, including artworks, lore tidbits that helped the player to make sense of a game’s narrative early on and even brief walkthrough sections detailing part of the game, for instance with Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger.
In Europe, early guidebooks produced by Nintendo itself in a variety of local languages, chiefly French and German, were even bundled with some regional editions of Secret of Mana, Lufia II, Illusion of Time and Terranigma (which was a PAL-exclusive localization to begin with), with beautiful big-box editions that are still an highlight for SNES Japanese RPG collectors.
-”ENHANCED” BY PLAY ONLINE
Of course, unofficial or licensed strategy guides were also extremely important, with Prima Games as one of the main players in the English-speaking world since the early ‘90s, when they first partnered with PC Gamer’s Russel De Maria, later becoming such a juggernaut that their books were also featured outside ot the US in plenty of European stores, despite not being localized in local languages.
Later on, in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, getting an official license was also a way to push those guidebooks’ credibility compared to other sources, even if in rare instances it could damage your work in other ways: Brady Games’ Final Fantasy IX guidebook, for example, was utterly ruined by the asinine idea of making some of its contents only available by using Square’s PlayOnline service (later turned into Final Fantasy XI’s online infrastructure), completely defeating the point of an analog walkthrough in an age where Gamefaqs was already becoming quite popular.
Then again, this kind of mix between analog and digital returned much later during the gold rush of Kickstarter RPGs, when digital walkthrough, in fact more akin to the clue books of old, were often part of a game’s campaign, whether as an in-built feature or as an unlockable perk fans could unlock by pledging additional amounts or by passing a certain threshold in the campaign’s global effort.
Something like this, for instance, happened in 2016 with inXile’s Torment: Tides of Numenera’s digital strategy guide, which led to an interesting situation when the game, itself based on the Numenera tabletop RPG setting by Monte Cook, ended up getting yet another guidebook, this time fleshing out the game’s setting in order to use it in a tabletop context, a bit like it happened decades before with the abovementioned Volo’s Guide to Baldur’s Gate II.
-MAGAZINES AND EARLY LET’S PLAY
Another extremely important analog venue for this kind of contents, of course, were videogame magazines, where tips and walkthroughs, which could get serialized in multiple issues in the case of RPGs, were often a hot commodity that could drive even more interest than reviews or news, letting people vicariously explore titles they sometimes couldn’t experience directly due to distribution issues or small print runs.
I still remember the walkthroughs for titles like Ultima, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VII, Baldur’s Gate, Daggerfall, Vagrant Story or Super Mario RPG (which wasn’t even released here in Europe, aside from bootleg copies which sometimes made their way in stores), which weren’t just interesting for those trying to make sense of some puzzle, dungeon or boss, but also a veritable visual storm of screenshots, artworks and colorful layouts one could lose himself into even after completing the title they focused on, or without even being interested in playing it, even more so considering how videogame magazines back then were extremely distant from the minimalistic design that later prevailed in that space.
In a way, those walkthroughs acted as a sort of analog version of what contemporary gamers would consider a Let’s Play, in a timeframe where Youtube itself would only start existing as a platform a decade later. This comparison could seem a bit forced to those who never experienced those writeups directly, but some of them brought the walkthrough genre to uncharted lands, like with Nintendo Power’s Secret of Mana strategy guide being written in first person as the hero’s diary.
As people familiar with Secret of Mana likely noticed, the artworks featured in Nintendo Power’s walkthrough-cum-diary were mostly new, created just for this piece by the incredibly talented Katsuya Terada, who by then had already created a number of Zelda-themed illustrations for that same magazine with a style inspired by the likes of Moebius and Otomo, mixing Western sword and sorcery with his own Japanese sensibility in a way that was also reminiscent of Jun Suemi and Hitoshi Yoneda.
While this could change dramatically depending on the magazine’s own policies, mailing sections also became a venue for directly asking for tips, which could be one of the few ways to have some niche titles getting additional coverage. Even in the early ‘10s, when I started writing for a number of my country’s videogame magazines, it was still fairly normal to have readers ask for tips.
Unsurprisingly, videogame magazine often ended up launching their own line of guidebooks, too, like with the abovementioned Famitsu-based efforts in Japan and, obviously, with Nintendo Power’s own renowned line of English guidebooks, which also gave an early spotlight to NES JRPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. Those releases, predating most other guidebooks and seeing widespread availability due to Nintendo’s popularity (Nintendo Power was directly controlled by Nintendo of America until the late ‘00s), were often quite beautiful, sporting dedicated artworks that make them sought-after collector item in their own right.
-HOTLINES AND THE LANDLINE HADOUKEN
In an age where analog landline home telephones were still kings and mobile phones, let alone smartphones, didn’t exist, there were also phone-based venues for game tips, like company-based hotlines, often being available only in select countries and covering only a number of titles depending on the publishers.
I still remember how TV ads in some children-focused shows here in my corner of Europe sometimes featured their own, extremely dubious videogame tip services, alongside even more bizarre things, like a local TV show which allowed two “lucky” callers to fight a virtualized Street Fighter II match on an unspecified platform by using their telephone buttons for inputs (to this day, I’m still not sure if this was actually the case or if they just scammed their paying callers, even if the matches were so wonky one could believe they were actually played that way).
Phones could also be used more proactively by players, calling developers or publishers featured in the manuals’ contact info to ask for tips even when a proper hotline service wasn’t even available, with some even sending letters (and, in some rare instances, even getting answers directly from the developers, especially if they had bought a clue book).
-THE QUEST FOR THE LOTUS SWORD, OR SAVING AERITH WITH THE POWER OF HEARSAY
Then, of course, you had the most analog way to communicate tips of all: hearsay. As a RPG-focused videogame enthusiast growing up in an European country in the early ‘90s, I was lucky enough to have a number of videogame magazines discussing import titles from the US and Japan, and shops actually stocking said titles while also providing the ways to actually play them on your consoles but, in an age where connecting with like-minded hobbysts outside of your own acquaintances wasn’t really an option, having friends to discuss said titles could get much harder.
Happily, I did have a few friends that got invested in this kind of games, and we loved sharing our games with each other while also helping each other if we got stuck, sometimes turning RPG games into a local multiplayer experience of sorts (well, aside of Secret of Mana, which made it one of its core features).
Of course, this could also cause some wild rumors to appear, and I’m still both amused and ashamed by how, back then, as a part of a running joke we had I managed to convince a lifelong friend of mine, one of those I played countless RPGs with, into believing he could randomly get a NPC to handle him a super-strong Lotus Sword item I made up on the spot if he kept entering Medina’s Inn in Chrono Trigger. Of course I confessed my misdeed soon after but maybe, if I didn’t had, I could have read someone else mentioning the Lotus Sword years later online, as this was the power of RPG hearsay back then.
Later, on a much wider scale, people shocked by Final Fantasy VII’s CD2 plot twist would came up with countless fake strategies to save Aerith, whose demise spawned such an outrage that players simply couldn’t believe there wasn’t a way to bring her back. Such is the power of love that no rumor seemed too far fetched to explore, whether by collecting esoteric items, peforming rhythm games-style button presses or disconnecting your controllers at the right time, with some of those strategies also finding their way in the least scrupolous mail and tips sections. Then again, people also wanted to believe there were ways to recruit Sephiroth, and I even heard people claiming there were secret events in Final Fantasy VIII, which of course they hadn’t experienced directly but were positively sure had to exist.
Then again, while most of those were obviously attempts to trick other players in an age where you couldn’t dispel such claims in a matter of seconds, I think they were actually rooted into a wider sensibility about videogame RPGs being still connected to their tabletop roots in a way that could trascend their actual contents, spawning theories, side-stories and what-if contents that were ar organic part of their overall experiences, serving as a precursor of sorts for the rise of videogame-based fanfiction a few years later.
-THAT FATEFUL NOVEMBER
Even while rejecting determinism, it’s hard to argue that this diverse world of tips and guidebooks wasn’t fated to slowly disappear with the rise of the digital space and the world wide web, but the rise of Gamefaqs surely speedran this development by centralizing walkthroughs and FAQs while also building a community of writers and readers which could appreciate and inspire each others’ work, keeping up an high standard of precision and formatting while slowly covering more and more titles in a way that previous community efforts couldn’t have fostered, even just because of design limits.
Even then, as discussed, after its late 1995 debut it took quite a while for Gamefaqs to become the disruptive force videogame enthusiasts remember, especially in the RPG space which required extensive work and documentation to produce high-quality guides, meaning RPG fans really started to make an habit of visiting this site around the turn of the millennium, when plenty of walkthroughs for older RPGs started appearing en masse while the wait for newly released titles became much shorter, gradually snowballing until the site was able to cover all but the most niche titles. Of course, the introduction of game-specific message boards helped to gather like-minded people and to foster even more FAQ attempts by new authors, building one of the largest and most resilient English videogame communities, putting aside the issues that place had in a number of other ways.
-HOW MANY TONERS MET THEIR FATE
Even so, while videogame RPG enthusiasts nowadays are used to peruse walkthroughs by instantly consulting them with their phones or tablets, back then in the late ‘90s things were much different, given desktop PCs were the only way to access Gamefaqs, often requiring the guides to be printed in order to avoid constantly interrupting your RPG playthrough to check the data in another room. Even for CRPGs, it was often very inconvenient to play in windowed mode or to go back to Desktop just to glimpse your trusty FAQ, meaning this situation ended up being commonplace for both those playing on consoles and PCs.
In fact, I still remember how, when I started consistently using Gamefaqs, I was crazy enough to think it would be nice to print out the walkthroughs of all my favorite RPGs, with my late Father being so kind to have some of them bound with a nice blue hardcover in a nearby bookbinder shop he was a customer of. Somewhere, I still have the volumes about Suikoden II and Final Fantasy Tactics he gifted me, two games I had discussed with him extensively, among others. It didn’t take long, however, to understand this was a foolish errand, exactly because the number of walkthroughs started piling up to such a degree it was impossible to read them all, as I initially did even for titles I aldready completed.
-THE RUSH FOR RPG FAQS
As for the walkthroughs I actually used, one of the first I remember was written for Capcom’s Breath of Fire III, which was published on Gamefaqs mere months after its 1998 US release, long before the game was even out here in Europe, with another one by a different author following soon after. Final Fantasy VIII, as could be expected for such a major release, had FAQs out for its Japanese version before its Western versions were even out and even a niche title with a small print run like Valkyrie Profile, a game that basically required a walkthrough due to its intricate systems and true ending requirements, somehow got a full walkthrough in early 2000 before I even had a chance to snatch an elusive import copy in a local store, likely the only one ever sold in my city.
Alongside JRPG aficionados, Western RPG fans were also putting some real work into their FAQs around the same time, with Fallout 2 getting two partial walkthroughs less than two months after its October 1998 release, Icewind Dale seeing some FAQ action right after its release and Troika’s Arcanum getting two walkthroughs between late 2001 and early 2002, for instance. After that, as mentioned, the exponential growth in walkthroughs was such that one could expect any semi-popular RPG to be properly documented soon after its Western release.
-TRAILBLAZERS AND TRANSLATORS
Still, what was surprising even then was that a number of writers scrambled to cover titles almost no one back then even know existed, especially regarding unlocalized or niche Japanese RPGs: just as an example among many, back in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, when I was researching and collecting many unlocalized Super Famicom games, I was surprised to see how Granhistoria, an incredibly fascinating SFC JRPG, got a partial walkthrough by SBruck in 1998 that, alongside a later one, is still one of the precious few English sources about this game, same as countless others, often predating even their fantranslation patches or, one could suspect, acting as one of their inspirations.
Some of those writers were veritable pioneers, working on countless titles and making them accessible in a way no official guidebook could have ever had simply because no one would have bothered with old, niche and untranslated titles: Ritchie, for instance, wrote an astounding amount of walkthroughs for untranslated JRPGs in the ‘00s, and one can imagine the sheer dedication he had for a task that likely brought him few accolades, given how most of those Gamefaqs boards were wastelands due to their games’ obscurity.
There were also plenty of writers who only engaged a number of select franchises, like with NStout working on most Front Mission games back in 1999, when the series had just surfaced in the West, or Kouli making a name for himself with his Tales FAQs, at least before he brought them to his own site, even if tackling all the writers who made a name for themselves over the decade would require a whole new piece.
Still, it’s also thanks to those people that a number of titles became more accessible for newcomers, even more so after fantranslation efforts ramped up in the same timeframe, not to mention the instances where the interest for a game started exactly because of it being at least partially documented in English.
Speaking of fantranslations, we all know localizing texts, as incredible as it is given the sheer size of most JRPG script, is actually just a part of the overall patching effort, which requires plenty of hacking and graphical work alongside the localized texts.
Since translators aren’t always lucky enough to find partners to work with on the coding, a number of English localized scripts were actually posted to Gamefaqs long before a proper patching effort ever materialized, with some notable examples being titles like Wachenroeder on Saturn, whose 2003 English script by gar3 is still the best way to play the game for Westerners (especially since its patching effort is still stranded), or Growlanser I on PS1 and Tales of Rebirth on PS2, both of which saw yours truly printing out the dialogues provided by Borgor and LordSpekio and consulting them while playing. There were even instances when textual translations could be used to complement a proper patch, like with Front Mission Second’s fantranslators releasing a script for the events they weren’t able to translate in-game due to a number of technical hurdles.
-ASCII MAPPING
Of course, for many of us Gamefaqs wasn’t just a matter of text to peruse, but also a visual resource of sorts: soon after the walkthrough rush, ASCII art painstakingly realized to recreate games’ logos and key arts in the context of plain text writeups became commonplace, with authors doing their best to overcome the lack of proper visual support with their sheer creativity, often with awesome results.
One of the first RPG-related examples was with JD Cyr’s rendition of the Chrono Trigger logo back in 1998, but there were countless others over the decades covering all manner of games in different genres, until the transition from plain text to proper HTML walkthroughs slowly ended up making them redundant, with DomzNinja\Ghost of Legault’s Tales of Vesperia ASCII logo being one of the last examples of this lost art in the RPG space in the early ‘10s, alongside ExtremePhobia’s Skyrim walkthrough.
At the same time, Paint mapmakers started gracing titles with their work in order to provide players with the layouts of dungeons and cities, not to mention annotated world maps, which became even more unvaluable over the years since, compared with the early ‘90s, it became rarer and rarer to see proper cloth or even paper maps included with RPGs, with Japanese RPGs basically not featuring them outside of some rare manual, like Suikoden’s, or limited edition, while Western RPGs managed to hold out a bit longer thanks to the additional space provided by PC big box editions.
Some of this visual coverage was actually devoted to titles basically no one perused, for the sheer generosity of sharing something the authors were passionate about, and, just as an example among many, I would like to thank Shogetsu for his Traverse: Starlight & Prairie world map back in 2005, published even before Jelt’s own walkthrough became the go-to resource for that unlocalized Super Famicom RPG. I’m not sure how many people actually clicked those links back then but, as one of the few that did, they were invaluable resources to get to know that game, same for its predecessor Soul & Sword.
Some of Gamefaqs’ mapmakers were astonishingly prolific, like with StarFighter76 providing almost 4000 maps over the decades across a huge number of RPGs, from Zelda II and Final Fantasy in 2005 (even if his non-RPG work on Super Mario Bros actually started in 2002, with him also covering countless survival horror and platform titles) to Falcom’s Romancia and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest in 2025.
Some of those people were so prolific I’m still discovering their works, like when I returned to Hot-B’s Ancient Magic on Super Famicom earlier this year (after writing my retrospective about Akihiro Yamada, that game’s art director and character designer) and noticed it had both a ritchie walkthrough and quite a number of StarFighters76 maps, and we’re talking about a game that, despite being fantranslated, was probably played by a few hundred people at best outside Japan.
Even if I never published on Gamefaqs, my own RPG-related mapmaking efforts, which had actually started on paper long before the web even existed, were inspired by those awesome people, transitioning to Paint for my rather terrible works on a number of titles like the Suikoden series, Growlanser, Arcturus, the Gagharv trilogy, Princess Crown or Zemuria’s known geography after Trails of Cold Steel II, which was soon made obsolete when Falcom actually unveiled the Western Erebonian regions in Cold Steel III and the North Ambrian and Remiferian topography in Akatsuki no Kiseki.
-COMPETITION AND HALLUCINATIONS
Of course, despite its success, Gamefaqs never had a monopoly on RPG walkthroughs: not only did strategy guides endure at least until the mid ‘10s, including plenty of niche efforts dedicated to fairly obscure Nintendo DS and PSP titles, but, even in the digital space, over the years a number of other platforms provided a fair amount of competition, like with IGN (which also acquired Gamesages), Cheat Code Central, Neoseeker or trophies and achievements-related sites, with many other outlets coming into the picture in the last decade and soon building their own sizeable resources, often including videos and screenshots, and that isn’t even considering let’s play archives and YouTube channels. Then again, a number of those efforts were actually professional in nature, with paid (hopefully, at least) writers tasked to cover the most requested games, which hardly compares to the spontaneous generosity we saw with Gamefaqs’ authors.
Information sharing between players also saw its own resurgence in the last fifteen years with a number of RPG subgenres, like with so-called Soulslikes fostering a community-wide effort to find secrets, hidden areas and powerful builds in the period immediately after each new title’s release, even if, compared with the rumors of old, all of this happening in the digital space made it faster and more reliable, if less personal compared with interacting directly with one’s friends and classmates.
With AI roaming freely upon the work of countless writers and now being used by many as a walkthrough provider of sorts (even if I’ve heard a number of horror stories about LLMs mixing up completely different games due to the usual hallucination issues, ultimately providing red herring to readers, which is par for the course and, in a way, acts as the contemporary version of the dubious hearsay theories about games’ secrets) traditional walkthroughs face another challenge at staying relevant, one that could distance even more young gamers from the communities that traditionally fostered curiosity and involvement and were able to inspire some to provide their own contents to make their beloved RPGs more documented, instead of quick usage without any sort of personal engagement.
Still, regardless of what the future of videogame RPGs may bring us, and as distant as this past can seem to younger RPG enthusiasts, I hope they can appreciate the pioneeristic spirit and generosity showcased by many of Gamefaqs’ authors over the decades and share their passion to those who will come to this hobby in the years to come, each in their own way and according to their own sensibilities.
This is first rate work. I think there is also more to say about the transition from text-based walkthroughs to broadcast walkthroughs, made possible by the rise of YouTube.
And I think that is actually a major development in the history of the internet. A substantial growth driver for YouTube had to have been the growing number of Let’s Players who released walkthroughs.
In a lot of ways, these broadcasters were picking up the tradition you identified here.
I remember waking up long before I needed to for school so I could spend the pre-dawn hours breathlessly reading Pokemon GameFAQs posts about all the rumors regarding finding Mew and testing them out uninterrupted. In one of the greatest ironies of the era, over a decade later it turned out there actually WAS an arcane ritual you could perform to catch a Mew on an unmodified cart, it just had nothing to do with any logic anyone back then was working off of.
My favorite part of GameFAQs was always the maps - enormous works of effort by people so obsessed with a game that they'd take up surveying as a hobby, thoroughly cataloguing every twist and turn and fake wall, and reducing what would be a scary forest, or confusing maze, or headache-inducing dungeon into a convenient guide you could just look through and picture not only your course but the entire structure of the game from a perspective otherwise impossible.
And in the era of guidebooks and hint lines, the gaming 'resource' that I will always remember are the Worlds of Power books, novelizations of various popular NES games that were published by Scholastic and so appeared at every book fair, but were absolutely not 'official' in any way, and actually took wild liberties with the stories, filling in the blanks with their own narratives and even whole characters. And my favorite of those was the Blaster Master novel, which expanded on the story that consisted of like two cutscenes and introduced a character who was later made canon by and integrated into the PSX game and the Zero series, along with some of the other elements of the book. Guess someone at Inti Creates also remembers reading that!