Old games packaged with huge amounts of superfluous lore

[jorpho]

I was just looking at the 80-page manual for Skuljagger (SNES) and it occurs to me: is there a list somewhere out there of older games that included way, way too much superfluous lore in their packaging?

I'm not counting things like the tie-in novels for Primal Rage or Rise of the Robots; that's probably beyond the scope. I'm thinking specifically of games where the publishers went to the expense of including all of it in the game packaging itself.

I figure there must already be a list somewhere out there like this, but I'm not sure where. TVTropes has tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllThereInTheManual , but that's not quite the same.

Examples that come to mind aside from Skuljagger include:
Drakkhen (specifically the computer versions)
Dungeon Master (I think?)
Lemmings 2: The Tribes (though that was a "limited edition" and my copy didn't include it)
Microcosm (Sega CD, among others)
Maybe old Yar's Revenge (2600)

I guess a lot of simulations (like SimCity 2000 and Their Finest Hour/Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe) probably tended to go heavy on the infodumps.

[grad]

How about tie-in comic books, e.g. Beneath a Steel Sky?

[jorpho]

Dec 9, 2023 0:39:34 GMT -5 grad said:

How about tie-in comic books, e.g. Beneath a Steel Sky?

I think there were a lot more of those, and most were only a couple of pages. Can you think of any that were unusually long?

[personman]

I can't say how long it was but I believe the Genesis/Megadrive port of Starflight had a short story in its manual written by Robert Silverberg I think. Only skimmed through it when I had a copy way back when but from what I vaguely recall it was meatier than you'd think it would be for such a thing.

[dr_st]

I don't know how one would define way-way-too-much, but:

Wing Commander IV had an excerpt of the book included:
i.ebayimg.com/images/g/QVcAAOSwZRdjE6fG/s-l1600.jpg

Crusader (both No Remorse and No Regret) had a lot of background lore, like a "newspaper", I think. Some copies included a strategy guide?

The Witcher Enhanced Edition included a large manual, an even larger strategy guide (complete walkthrough), and one of Sapkowski's original short stories about The Witcher.

But all of it felt "in place", nothing like that 80-page "manual" which is mostly an unrelated story + 2 pages of instructions...

[JDarkside]

This isn't that surprising when you remember memory limitations games used to have to deal with. Unless you were making a novel style experience or adventure game, there often wasn't much room for a lot of text. I remember this being especially bad on consoles up until the Saturn and PS1. A lot of these games were made by developers obsessed with text heavy mediums, like table top games and their huge rule books, so a lot of them just did what those games did by necessity of all context being in a large book and added information via manual.

I don't think the lore was needless so much as the technology wasn't there to fully put in the vision the developers had, so what you're left with is a game with little context and whatever they could fit in a smaller manual.

[ommadawnyawn2]

Stonekeep came with a book! Couldn't get the game to work so that's all I got from it bitd.

[dsparil]

Not lore per se, but a lot of old Maxis games came with really padded out manuals filled extra info. I can't find a PDF of El-Fish's manual to refresh my memory, but I think that one was probably the most lopsided in terms of actual product instruction. It's not even a game just an aquarium designer with randomly generated fish. That did not need a manual in the hundreds of pages!

[Snake]

King's Quest VI comes to mind.  It comes packed with a reasonably nice guidebook, filled with stories and lore and such.  It's actually quite a necessary accompaniment to the game, since the content correlates with clues to solving the puzzles, in-game.

[Snake]

Snatcher and Policenauts also come to mind.

At least in-game, in areas where there are things like databases to access.  There are huge amounts of back-history, lore, and events to create context for their respective worlds.  Policenauts even has a whole music CD collection to explore when you're investigating one of the houses.  

[teroknor]

Dec 9, 2023 4:22:35 GMT -5 dr_st said:

Wing Commander IV had an excerpt of the book included:
i.ebayimg.com/images/g/QVcAAOSwZRdjE6fG/s-l1600.jpg

Crusader (both No Remorse and No Regret) had a lot of background lore, like a "newspaper", I think.

Origin were basically the masters of this. Both Ultima and Wing Commander, but also many of their lesser-known games. The manuals were usually some sort of in-universe document: spellbooks, journals, traveller's guides, magazines, spaceship owner's manuals, etc.

As mentioned in the OP and later, the manuals of the Lucasfilm WWII sims and several Maxis games were basically textbooks on the topic in question.

[dsparil]

All* of Infocom's games came with stuff like that. It was a bit annoying that the Zork collection on GOG has really bad scans since the bestiary that came with Beyond Zork and the calendar for Zork Zero had game relevant information in them. Zork Zero is literally impossible to finish without the calendar!

* They started with their third game Deadline in 1982. The two Zorks that preceded it got reissued at some point with extras.

[blackdrazon]

Dec 12, 2023 14:48:59 GMT -5 dsparil said:

All* of Infocom's games came with stuff like that. It was a bit annoying that the Zork collection on GOG has really bad scans since the bestiary that came with Beyond Zork and the calendar for Zork Zero had game relevant information in them. Zork Zero is literally impossible to finish without the calendar!

* They started with their third game Deadline in 1982. The two Zorks that preceded it got reissued at some point with extras.

I think it really goes to show that, according to interviews, Deadline got those extras because it needed it, and not because they just thought it would be neat. The games are all text, so you'd think they'd be tiny, and the Z-Machine, the software that runs them, isn't that big! But there was still so much text that there wasn't enough space! Modern data compression has spoiled us. C64 games got larger over time, but Deadline on the C64 is nearly three times larger than Boulder Dash from two years later!