Ok, so I was scrounging through Koji Igarashi’s trash (in a totally journalistic capacity) when I happened across the following pages. I only managed to scan a handful before their informative radiance broke the scanner, but I’ll post more once I work around that bottleneck.

Who knows, maybe if I’m suddenly inspired (or I find a bored graphic designer willing to work for site credit), I’ll bind these and the ingame pages into an honest-to-intellectual-property-theft manual.

Video game manuals are hardly sexy, which is why nobody ever talks about them. Press like myself tend to be so familiar with control schemes that there’s rarely much to gain from reading those monochrome pages. In-game tutorials and tooltips are usually enough to get you up to speed anyway, so manuals are pretty redundant. However, accessibility is a mainstay of modern gaming culture, and if you want a game that’s more complex than Mario Party, you’ll probably want a little documentation.