In late 1981 Ken Uston, a card counter who had made his name beating Las Vegas casinos at blackjack, spent four days writing a book about Pac-Man. Video Games magazine reported that within three weeks of publication Mastering Pac-Man had reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list. To find his routes through the maze he drew up the board, photocopied “about 100 copies” and experimented with patterns on them. He knew who his readers were. “I’m helping these 12-year-old kids save a little money,” he told the magazine. “Arcade operators don’t like it, but that’s life.”
Fast facts
- First wave: arcade guides in 1981–82, among them Tom Hirschfeld’s How to Master the Video Games (Bantam, $2.95) and Uston’s Mastering Pac-Man (Signet, $1.95).
- Publishers’ own guides: Melbourne House’s A Guide to Playing The Hobbit (1984); Nintendo’s Official Nintendo Player’s Guide (by 1988).
- The guide industry: Prima’s Secrets of the Games line from 1990; BradyGames from November 1993; Piggyback, in Europe, from 1998.
- Price: most Sega-related American guides of the 1990s cost between $9.95 and $14.99; in Britain in 2004 a guide cost about £10, “a quarter (but often more)” of the price of the game.
- End of an era: Penguin Random House announced in November 2018 that it would close Prima Games in 2019.
Arcade guides, 1981–82
The first boom in guides followed the first boom in arcade games. Computer Gaming World reviewed Hirschfeld’s How to Master the Video Games at the start of 1982: 177 pages billed as “the first complete guide to the 30 most popular coin-operated arcade games”, sorted into Space Invaders-type games, Asteroids-type games, maze games, reflex games and the rest. Hirschfeld opened with “Seven Steps to Mastery”, from reconnaissance (watch the game played several times before you try) to memorisation, and added a chapter of hand, eye and finger exercises for the player.
By July 1982 Electronic Games had a shelf of them to review, and not all were welcome. “Here come the quickie rip-offs,” it began, of a 48-page booklet called How to Win at Video Games ($2.50): “Save your money. You’ll learn more by changing the $2.50 into quarters and playing the games.” It found Hirschfeld’s book dry but “certainly one of the best primers on the coin-op scene yet produced”. Mastering Pac-Man it rated “one of the better books on playing electronic games now available”: 128 pages that would serve a novice, and that the “utter fanatic” aiming to become what Uston called a “Pac-Master”, consistently scoring 150,000 or more, “will make this his bible”. Uston followed it with Score! Beating the Top 16 Video Games and a 674-page Guide to Buying and Beating the Home Video Games, and Electronic Games was already billing him as “best-selling author of ‘Mastering Pac-Man’” that spring.
Guides from the publishers
Home computer adventures produced a different kind of guide, sometimes from the company that sold the game. Melbourne House published David Elkan’s A Guide to Playing The Hobbit in 1984, 76 pages of locations, screens and hints for The Hobbit. CRASH stressed that it was “only a Guide and not The Solution”, since the game had “no one perfect solution”, and Computer & Video Games noted that it took the player through the adventure at three different levels of help.
Nintendo’s own guide reached some players with the console itself. In 1988 a reader wrote to the first issue of Nintendo Power asking for a copy of The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide, which a friend had “acquired” when he bought the NES basic set, and later that year the magazine told another reader that there were no plans yet for a second one. Nintendo Power itself, with its maps and walkthroughs, did the same job in every issue.
Prima, BradyGames and the guide industry
The modern guide business, Edge wrote in 2004, was, “most agree”, “sired in 1990 by Prima Publishing with its ‘Secrets of the Games’ imprint”, which made its debut with Nintendo Game Secrets. BradyGames was “established in November 1993 with the Mortal Kombat Kompanion”. Their books split into two kinds. Some were “official”, licensed by the game’s publisher; others were openly “unauthorized”, like Prima’s Sega Saturn Pocket Power Guide Unauthorized of 1997. A list of Sega-related books published in the United States shows how stable the price was: of 57 guides and secrets books from 1990 to 1999, 47 cost between $9.95 and $14.99, from Sega Genesis Secrets at $9.95 in 1990 to a run of Dreamcast guides at $12.99 in 1999.
By 2004 Edge found a big business. Prima said at least eight of its titles had sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States in 2003, among them guides to Madden NFL 2004 and Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, and claimed more than 1,100 books and 90 million copies in print in its 14 years. BradyGames spoke of a Final Fantasy guide with more than a million sold. Piggyback, founded in 1998 to make guides for European markets, began with a guide to Metal Gear Solid and spent more than six months on each book; with Konami’s artwork it made official guides that Edge called “coffee table pieces”.
The work was hard. “We’ve written some books in seven days,” Prima’s lead in-house author, Mario DeGovia, told Edge. “Our days are long when we’re doing a guide - 12 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week is common.” Leigh Davis, editor-in-chief at BradyGames, thought a guide harder to write than a computer book, because “you have no way of knowing how long it will take you to get through the game”.
The internet, and after
Free help arrived alongside the books. Players posted walkthroughs to sites such as GameFAQs from 1995, and by the turn of the century, Edge wrote, “many were inclined to forecast” that home internet access would damage the guide market. Why pay “£10 — a quarter (but often more) of the RRP of the actual game” when “CJayC’s GameFAQs site can offer a bare-bones equivalent for free”? “People have been asking the same question for ten years,” Davis replied. “And you know what? We’re selling more strategy guides now than we ever have.” In Britain, the other paid source of answers, the premium-rate hint line, charged by the minute.
The two rivals ended under one owner. Random House bought Prima in 2001, and its merger with Penguin in 2013 put Prima and BradyGames in the same company; in June 2015 BradyGames was folded into the Prima Games name. In November 2018 Penguin Random House announced that it would close Prima Games in 2019. The brand was sold in March 2019 and continued as a website, without the printed guides.
Sources
- Video Games (US) vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, pp. 22–25: Roger Dionne’s interview with Ken Uston (writing Mastering Pac-Man in four days in late 1981, the New York Times list, the photocopied boards, the “12-year-old kids”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 2, January–February 1982, p. 26: review of How to Master the Video Games.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 3, May 1982, p. 82: Uston as “best-selling author of ‘Mastering Pac-Man’”. Vol. 1 no. 5, July 1982, pp. 57 and 60: Charlene Komar’s reviews of How to Win at Video Games, How to Master the Video Games and Mastering Pac-Man.
- CRASH issue 5, June 1984, p. 78: competition and description of A Guide to Playing The Hobbit. Computer & Video Games issue 32, June 1984, p. 159: review of the same book.
- Nintendo Power issue 1, July–August 1988, letters: The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide. Issue 3, November–December 1988, letters: no plans for a second guide.
- Edge issue 135, April 2004: “Playing it by the book”, feature on strategy-guide publishing (Prima’s start in 1990 and its figures; BradyGames from November 1993; Piggyback; Mario DeGovia and Leigh Davis; the price of a guide and GameFAQs).
- Sega Retro, “List of books in the United States” (database, web, secondary): titles, dates and prices of Sega-related guides, 1990–1999. https://segaretro.org/List_of_books_in_the_United_States
- Shacknews, “Prima Games is shutting down after 28-year run”, 9 November 2018 (web, secondary): the closure announcement. https://www.shacknews.com/article/108425/prima-games-is-shutting-down-after-28-year-run
- Wikipedia, “Prima Games” (web, secondary): Random House’s purchase in 2001, the merger with BradyGames on 1 June 2015, the closure announced in November 2018 and the sale in March 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_Games