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.
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.
Thanks for your kindness and support, I reaIly appreciate it.
As mentioned, I also believe the roots of the kind of vicarious experiences provided by Let’s Plays in the past two decades can be partially retraced to a number of older analog experiences like narrated walkthroughs, which let the reader discover a game's contents while also framing the overall experience in flavorful and unique ways.
There's also something to say about videogame fanfiction having some traits in common with hearsay and rumor mongering taken to the point of building alternate, community-driven narratives meant to foster (or oppose) some unexpected story developments.
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!
Fantastic work!! Especially as someone who lived and breathed GameFAQs back in the day. You might want to try pitching ideas like this in future to someone like Darran at Retro Gamer!!
Thanks for your kindness! Gamefaqs really became an integral part of the way many of us enjoyed videogame RPGs, not to mention how it fostered the efforts of some truly dedicated trailblazers, who wrote detailed walkthroughs for obscure, unlocalized games that only got some attention many years later.
Automatically generating a dedicated message board for each new game added to the database was also a game-changer in this regard.
Thanks for your great post ! I was very surprised to be mentioned despite the few guides I've written. Traverse Starlight & Prairie never got the translation that the YnT translation team was working on and I don't know if it will ever be translated (the game has garnered very little attention AFAIK).
There's a mistake on the first guide for Traverse S&P as you take the last update date from Gamefaqs as the document release date. The world map was released amongst the last, the first was the character creation guide, then my walkthrough. I've used an automatic translation of a Japanese website that Shogetsu sent me back then to write my guide, but it was a mess with a lot of missing content (all endings for instance). Most of my walkthrough was written by walking randomly on the world map using the in-game indications, sometimes trying to find quests that were indicated in the game.
It was a lot of fun to explore a game without knowing anything or even understanding the dialogues, even though it's time consuming (even worse while writing the guide).
I hoped it would help other players enjoy the game and I'm really amazed to see it mentioned 20 years later !
Thanks for your kindness, it’s awesome to see my piece was able to reach you!
My little retrospective was meant to celebrate exactly the kind of enthusiasts who would opt to dedicate dozens of hours of trial and error and direct research to introduce others to incredibly niche games like Traverse, and the way people like you helped those invested in exploring and studying those titles can’t really be understated.
A great article! It really captures the authenticity of guidebooks and just how special they truly were. Crazy to think how accessible guides are in this day and age!
Whenever my son gets stuck in a game nowadays he asks us to just look up the walkthroughs because they’re SO accessible now, but we try to make him sort it out himself before resorting to the playthroughs and gamefaqs, just for our nostlagia’s sake!
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.
Thanks for your kindness and support, I reaIly appreciate it.
As mentioned, I also believe the roots of the kind of vicarious experiences provided by Let’s Plays in the past two decades can be partially retraced to a number of older analog experiences like narrated walkthroughs, which let the reader discover a game's contents while also framing the overall experience in flavorful and unique ways.
There's also something to say about videogame fanfiction having some traits in common with hearsay and rumor mongering taken to the point of building alternate, community-driven narratives meant to foster (or oppose) some unexpected story developments.
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!
Fantastic work!! Especially as someone who lived and breathed GameFAQs back in the day. You might want to try pitching ideas like this in future to someone like Darran at Retro Gamer!!
Thanks for your kindness! Gamefaqs really became an integral part of the way many of us enjoyed videogame RPGs, not to mention how it fostered the efforts of some truly dedicated trailblazers, who wrote detailed walkthroughs for obscure, unlocalized games that only got some attention many years later.
Automatically generating a dedicated message board for each new game added to the database was also a game-changer in this regard.
😜❤️
Thanks for your great post ! I was very surprised to be mentioned despite the few guides I've written. Traverse Starlight & Prairie never got the translation that the YnT translation team was working on and I don't know if it will ever be translated (the game has garnered very little attention AFAIK).
There's a mistake on the first guide for Traverse S&P as you take the last update date from Gamefaqs as the document release date. The world map was released amongst the last, the first was the character creation guide, then my walkthrough. I've used an automatic translation of a Japanese website that Shogetsu sent me back then to write my guide, but it was a mess with a lot of missing content (all endings for instance). Most of my walkthrough was written by walking randomly on the world map using the in-game indications, sometimes trying to find quests that were indicated in the game.
It was a lot of fun to explore a game without knowing anything or even understanding the dialogues, even though it's time consuming (even worse while writing the guide).
I hoped it would help other players enjoy the game and I'm really amazed to see it mentioned 20 years later !
Thanks for your kindness, it’s awesome to see my piece was able to reach you!
My little retrospective was meant to celebrate exactly the kind of enthusiasts who would opt to dedicate dozens of hours of trial and error and direct research to introduce others to incredibly niche games like Traverse, and the way people like you helped those invested in exploring and studying those titles can’t really be understated.
That article unlocked some memories hehe.
A great article! It really captures the authenticity of guidebooks and just how special they truly were. Crazy to think how accessible guides are in this day and age!
Whenever my son gets stuck in a game nowadays he asks us to just look up the walkthroughs because they’re SO accessible now, but we try to make him sort it out himself before resorting to the playthroughs and gamefaqs, just for our nostlagia’s sake!