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I'd like to add a corollary to Rachel's article: Library book sales offer similar opportunities. My wife works for our county library system, and she's brought me some interesting relics of video-game history as well.
Within the last decade, games media has become almost completely dominated by the Internet. Gaming is a fast-moving, constantly-changing medium, so books and magazines simply cannot keep up with the industry the same way that the online resources can.
Previews, reviews, strategy guides, and other documents are all available online for free. If a gamer gets stuck in a game, she sure as heck won’t choose to drive to GameStop for a guide when the answers can be had in a few minutes with a web browser. But for someone interested in the history and culture of gaming, the Internet’s fluid nature is a deterrent. Unless you and your friends are the type of people who horde old magazines and books, you may be out of luck. Or you could just visit your local used bookstore.
Most used bookstores will offer credit for any piece of printed material in good enough condition to sell. This means that the typical used bookstore has a rack of aged strategy guides and maybe even a pile or two of old gaming magazines. Being a lifelong bibliophile, I regularly visit my local used bookstores. As a gamer, I can’t leave a used bookstore without first perusing the old stacks of strategy guides. Initially, I found the largely obsolete guides quaint and amusing. But as I unearth more guides, I’m actually starting to develop a nostalgia-driven affection for them. As far as I’m concerned, the more battered and thumbed through the guide, the better.
I love finding a discarded guide that shows signs of real use: books that I can tell were once important and needed just by looking at them I don’t usually purchase any of these books. For all of my talk of having affection for them, they are ultimately useless to me. But there have been a few I haven’t been able to resist buying. The first one I bought was Mortal Kombat II Arcade Secrets. When I first paged through the book, it was a disappointment. As a strategy guide, Mortal Kombat II Arcade Secrets is almost criminally simplistic. For each character, only very basic combo strings are offered, and other goodies, like an interview with Mortal Kombat creators Ed Boon and John Tobias, are uninspiring. Actually, the most useful parts of the guide are a perforated page listing all the characters moves and very detailed instructions to locate Mortal Kombat 2’s hidden characters: Jade, Noob Saibot, and Smoke.
But the pull of my beloved Mortal Kombat was just too strong; as flawed as the guide is, I still bought it. (It helps that I only had to pay $2.50 for it.) The next book I bought -- and probably my favorite used bookstore find of all time -- was How to Win at Video Games: A Complete Guide. Published in 1982, How to Win at Video Games really does make a valiant attempt at covering every game on the market at that time. Pac-Man, Defender, Asteroids, Tempest, Frogger, and many others all received a detailed, strategic write-up. In the opening chapter, author George Sullivan gives general tips for success in the arcade. Most are fairly obvious with headings like "Observe, Practice, Experiment." Then there’s this section:
Complain and Explain
Suppose you've practiced you favorite game by the hour, you’ve learned to observe and you’ve learned to concentrate, and your hands are so quick that you’re thinking of becoming a magician -- and your scores are still an embarrassment to you. What then? Should you admit that you simply lack the necessary skills? Not at all. Instead, develop several excuses that you can rely on. Here are some from which to choose:
"I wasn't playing for score -- I was just experimenting.”
“The stick (or knob, or firing button, or trigger, or whatever) is too loose (or too tight).
"There’s no way to control the game.”
“Never talk to me when I’m playing. You see what you made me do?”
“I thought they fixed this machine” (said though clenched teeth and while wearing a scowl).
“Somebody bumped into me.”
“I can’t stand it when someone stares at the screen when I’m playing. It makes me lose my concentration.”
“There must be a new chip in this machine. It never played like this before.”
“I never catch a break.”
It's sections like the above “complain and explain” advice that charmed me the most. The book was written for kids; from what I can decipher the book was sold by publisher Scholastic in direct sales catalogs. With that in mind, I love how positive and hopeful the book is. Here’s a great example:
What’s ahead? More games, of course. And games that challenge more.
You’re going to see more gobble games on the order of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Midway, the company that brought you those games, is releasing Kick Man, hoping that it gains a fraction of the popularity achieved by the Pacs.
You’ll see more talking games, such as Berzerk. There are going to be voice-activated games in which you give verbal instructions to the computer. Three-dimensional games are also on the way.
Other games of the future will be able to be manned by as many as four players. They’ll blast away at one another until only one player survives for final combat with the computer.
Some news isn’t good. In some parts of the United States, the 50-cent game is already a reality. And the dollar game is being talked about.
[…] Video games have been around for only about ten years, and look at the impact they’ve had. The next ten years promise to be even more exciting.
Amen to that.
If you live in a community with a used bookstore or two, go on in and see what they have. I’m certain there are more great examples of gaming literature waiting to be unearthed
Originally posted on Digitalhippos.com.
