Fun and unique ways you learned game tricks before the internet!

[BetaWolf]

Before we could look up guides and Let's Play videos online, we had to learn about games through other methods. For certain games, reading the manual was absolutely necessary. Others had more unique ways to tell you what to do. Aside from the obvious, here are some of mine:

-Promotional/advertising campaigns. Some companies, such as toys, candy and cereal, teamed up with game companies to have game tips and tricks as a reward. I can distinctly remember tips for Banjo-Kazooie being printed on Fruit by the Foot wrappers. One of the tips I read, I still use to this day: Life replenishing honeycombs never go away. If you have full health, you can leave the area and pick it up later if needed.

-Attract screens. Some games intentionally hid tricks in their gameplay demos. Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon's Trap has a hint in the manual telling you to watch the demo videos for tips, and the character is shown breaking bricks with items hidden in them.

-Printed material. Game manuals, guides, and magazines. Nintendo Power in particular had many maps and guides for certain games. Sometimes, I wonder if certain games were made just to sell Nintendo Power subscriptions. Other magazines had helpful hints... or sometimes, not so much.
Protip: To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies.

-Word of mouth. Often from people who owned guides/subscriptions of aforementioned magazine.

-Gameplay. This comes in a few varieties. Sometimes, when a game introduced you to a new item, it trapped you inside of a room that required you to learn said item in order to escape. Some games just told you through dialog how to use an item.
My favorite is, perhaps, when a game demonstrates something to you in a subtle way. Going back to Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon's Trap, the final dungeon contains a section where you must navigate through a permeable wall. It has enemies set up to travel through some of these paths, in order to show you where they are.

What are some other ones?

[celerystalker]

Most of what I learned was through sources you mentioned. Talking to friends, Nintendo Power, books by Jeff Rovin, attract screens, manuals...

A couple of others, though:

I did learn about the fortress warp whistle in Super Mario Bros 3 from The Wizard like many other people.

I still have some little tip cards that came with gum and cereal.

There were pretty generic tips on the boxes of Nintendo cereal, but I still read them like they were the gospel.

I remember seeing a few tips on the Super Mario Super Show and Captain N, and watching people play on shows like Nick Arcade for how they played, although I remember them almost all sucking.

[Tanooki]

Basically all that stuff you two said applies to me, though I hate marshmallow(cereal too) but I loved DK cereal a lot. One other thing where I learned unique ways was when you only could get a few games or so a year, you played the hell out of them and then got creative with it. Also I got some of the Worlds of Power books back then too along with those Tops scratcher cards and they both had tips in print on the pages, detachable cards, or the backs of the scratcher cards.

I've never seen it in any hint books or NP, I even submitted it to them and got blown off quietly too, but in SMB2 I found a way to ape an extra coin for the slot machine. It's in the first stage of the game, where you can get the potion for that 4th mushroom. If you blow it back by the door you came out there's a row of grass there, and if you flip the coin like one 8x8 block away from the edge of the rise with the door on it as subcon vanishes, the coin will flip into the real world and get stuck up on the edge of that ledge -- which you can then hop on top of and pick up again for +1 coin. I think there's a few other places it can be done, but that's the one I remember and always did.


This topic shames me indirectly, I bought a couple months ago locally the Captain N complete series on DVD for a stellar deal and still have yet to make time to watch it. I need to just man up and throw it in on my lunches or something. I've heard from enough it aged well enough to be funny but not stupid like some say the original TMNT has done sadly.

[The 1 2 P]

Most things have already been mentioned but the first real cheat code I learned about was the Konami code and I'm trying to think of who I learned that from. It was either my friends or cousins but after I learned it Contra games were never the same.....they could actually be beaten now.

[BlastProcessing402]

A lot of the early tricks I learned came from the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter. I had a couple of friends who had the NES a while before me, but apparently they never sent in the warranty card. I did, and wound up with issue 2 of the newsletter showing up in my mailbox. I think the biggest thing we learned was -1 in SMB.

Some tricks, I don't even know how we knew, we just did. Like holding the button to continue in SMB. That one we knew from the start, yet the first kid we knew with an NES, his copy of SMB didn't have the manual because it was the last one, the floor copy, and they'd lost the manual (this was long before Gamestop existed, BTW). Was that trick even in the manual? I don't recall, but whatever the case, there wasn't any way we could have learned of it, there weren't any magazines at the time yet, certainly no internet. Yet we knew.

[Tanooki]

You're probably right about the Fun Club magazine, I had every one of them back then. Though sheer luck not too long ago I recovered a couple of them cheap but used -- Link and RC Pro Am covers. They're fun reads and do have tips like the minus world in SMB there. They never were long but the wealth of cool little stories and the good tips went a long way to bringing NP to life and living for so so long.