The Strategy Guide Shelf
A strategy guide was a book you bought because the game would not tell you where to go. Nintendo printed its own through Nintendo Power — hand-drawn maps, enemy tables and the routes the designers expected you to miss — and gave most of them commissioned cover art that appeared nowhere else. That is the part worth hanging on a wall: a shelf of these reads less like a stack of manuals than like a run of illustration. Twenty-one here, photographed one cover at a time.
Here for the monitor buying guide instead? What to Check Before You Buy a PVM-20L5 is over in Stories.
The shelf twenty-one guides
Twenty of these are Player’s Guides, the softcover format Nintendo sold one game at a time. The odd one out is Final Fantasy, a Nintendo Power Strategy Guide — magazine format, with the volume number and the cover price printed right on the front. A second copy of the EarthBound guide is on the For Sale page.
