Totally Unauthorized Fighting Secrets III: No Mercy

Their Lion King and Donkey Kong Country 3 guides, you say? Well, we might be seeing those very soon...

2 hours ago, WraithTDK said:

People looking at the newsstands: "Totally Unauthorized, they're rebels!"

Brady editors candidly: "we BEGGED for authorization and no one would ever give it to us."

From my understanding, you aren't that far from the truth. For the first ten to fifteen years of strategy guide writing, there was almost an adversarial relationship between the game companies and the guide authors. Game companies wanted players to spend time going through their games and uncovering goodies on their own, rather than having someone spoil everything for them in a book outright. They also saw the rental market as a massive part of their business: rent a game for two nights to try it out, then go buy your own copy when you liked it and wanted to see it through to completion. But if you could use a book to plot your entire path through the game and beat it in 48 hours, that was a lost sale to the game maker.

The guide writers, by contrast, were simply trying to fill a niche that was chock full of people who wanted their particular widget (the promise of video game dominance), and it took quite some time for the idea of a game's publisher or developer officially licensing the rights to a game guide to someone else to take hold. Especially since Nintendo, the 900-pound gorilla of the industry, wrote and published all their guides in-house, making use of their own resources, and churning out game guides that left everyone else's looking positively pedestrian.

Once it became clear to game makers that there was additional money in licensing the rights to create an official game guide (and for hot titles, this could kick off a massive bidding war for licensing fees), it got dirty in the guide trenches. A guide company had to do everything they could to compete if they couldn't land the license to a massive AAA release from Squaresoft or Konami, so they relied on that 90's "extreme" aesthetic to cast themselves as the scrappy underdog, who nevertheless dug in and got all the info "the hard way", without having to lean on the game's developers to spill all the beans; able to give away all the dirty little secrets the game publisher didn't want told. And make no mistake, this absolutely sold guides back then.

"The official, authorized guide is $14.99? Sucks to be them: you can get ours for $12.99. Theirs is $12.99? Too bad ours is completely unauthorized, completely independent, and completely yours for $9.99!"

But, yeah, that's literally how things went down back in the day. I love it.

On 2/20/2022 at 5:58 PM, WraithTDK said:

Fascinating stuff. I had no idea. PC game makers used to make hint books all the time. Seirra even advertised their hint books IN their adventure games a few times.

I think the big difference there is that, by and large, it was the game makers themselves who were publishing the PC hint books, and thus pocketing all the money for doing so. Infocom had their line of "InvisiClues" hint books, Sierra used the little window with the red acetate which let you read individual clues without spoiling the whole game, SSI included forms where you could write in and get the hint books for their D&D games right in the box...but these were all solutions printed up and sold by the developers. Granted, not every company did this, which is why you had people like Shay Addams doing the QuestBusters news letter, and publications like Computer Gaming World offering up hint columns by Scorpia, but it was at least something the game makers occasionally put out themselves.

It's also worth remembering that you couldn't exactly rent PC games the same way you could console games. If you paid $60 for your copy of Phantasmagoria, it mattered little to Sierra whether you spent 400, 40, or 4 hours playing it since they had your money regardless. Pick up the guide to the game they were selling, and they made another $15, so what's not to like? 

Console game makers, on the other hand, rarely if ever published their own hint books for games. There are exceptions: Phantasy Star III had its own in-house hint book. Ultima: Exodus got its own in-house book for the NES edition. Nintendo produced things like the Game Atlas, Official Nintendo Player's Guide, and short booklets describing how to beat The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. back in the day. But it was rare to see a third-party company make its own hint book, probably because they didn't have their own publishing arm like Nintendo did.

2 hours ago, miketheratguy said:

What the hell is the inherent benefit of writing an unauthorized account of how to input a fatality?

You can sell it two dollars cheaper than the book which was authorized by the developers to tell you how to input a fatality.