To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/to-the-rapidly-aging-person-reading-this-gamefaqs-is-30-years-old-and-people-are-sharing-their-memories-of-the-venerable-guide-hub/Open linkView original on piefed.world514
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I absolutely love the no-nonsense approach of gamefaqs (and the likes). <3
if I'm stuck in a game (usually some 90's point&click adventure), more often than not I just want an easily ctrl+f searchable walkthrough, and does the site ever provide.
I remember how useful the FFX-2 guide was. We didn't have a computer at home when I was a kid, but I was able to head to the town library and print off the neat formatted text only guide.
man, the mention of printed-faq's opened a core memory. I had One Must Fall 2097 and Mortal Kombat move-lists printed out
Nothing beats those old ascii art guides. When you're playing an old game, you know they won't let you down.
everything is fucking videos now. You get stuch at a very particular place? Prepare to sift through literally hours of video instead of, for example, just searching for the name of the place you're in ingame
Nah, there's a lot of text guides too. But the problem is that they're often just copied from one source that somehow manages to get basic shit wrong every damn time. And videos definitely have their place, so many times I've first searched for a text guide and only got more confused. As long as the videos are short and to the point I always appreciate them. Found some great channels that way that have helped me through several games.
did you know that the more inappropriate the place you put the word "fucking" in is, the more seriously people will take your comments? :D
yes, but thanks for telling me anyway :)
The written language is developed by the spoken language. I.e. colloquialisms are king.
I raged against people using literally when they mean figuratively for years. I lost.
I was fascinated at one point by ASCII art. I had seen someone manually drawing some ASCII emoji on a cup as a kid. Weird...
When I was 14, I got in a flame war with another kid in the pokemon forum. I dropped a “What do you know? You’re probably 12!” He replied “Yeah, I’m 12. This is a pokemon forum. What are you doing here?”
I felt so thoroughly burned that I stayed out of internet arguments as much as possible from that point forward. A real valuable lesson early on. Thanks, GameFAQs!
Funny, dunking on some old dude back in the day got me hooked on internet arguments.
Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?
I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
The first guide i know i got from GameFAQs was Star Wars Masters of Teräs Käsi, which came out in '97. I may have used it before that.
I also had printed out game guides (on the supersede white and green paper) in the early 80s.
unlike many printed guides, gamefaqs guides came out some time after game release, because average people didn't have preview versions of the game to play
GameFAQs was definitely responsible for anyone knowing the fatalities in Mortal Kombat games for a while. I was using it plenty in the mid 90s.
I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
I'm sure there were other sources before it ended up on GameFAQs, but it was a one-stop shop for all the stuff you would have found in magazines and strategy guides, and it was free. And that was the difference. The one kid on the playground who knew about GameFAQs would share, and internet adoption only went up over time. GameFAQs is almost solely responsible for strategy guides and hint hotlines becoming obsolete.
I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
I'm not convinced the market for strategy guides was "booming" by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I'd wager due to GameFAQs.
I'd imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there's still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don't when they're crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.
It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.
Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.
Alright, sure, a pivot to the collector's market makes sense, but it makes sense in the same way that GameStop pivoted to Funko Pops, you know? Neither GameStop nor Funko is bankrupt yet, but it's pretty clear what caused their decline.
Emphasis mine, that's exactly my point. Video is crowdsourced and leads to revenue, while GameFAQs crowdsourced guides don't. When I look up a YouTube answer to a question about the game I'm playing, and they have 4 minutes of preamble describing the problem before they show me the solution so that advertisers like their video better, it sure seems to explain the A->B. Speaking for myself, embedding images in guides never made them that much more useful to me, and the era we're in now where the likes of IGN are taking over text based guides just leads to far more of them being incomplete and never finished.
Something's that's easy to forget is barely half of US households were even online by the 360's release. Under a third had broadband. Even the Nintendo Power hotline ran until 2010.
I sold thousands of book guides at Gamestop, and the retailers also pushed them because they were higher margin than the games themselves. Yes, back then, the gaming enthusiasts knew GameFAQs was the place for info, but the mass market? The vast majority still got their info from guides and magazines, or word-of-mouth.
It's like social media adoption. The mass market didn't jump in until a generation later.
Prior to Gamefaqs, I myself was perusing Gamewinners.com...a similar forum site lol
I got in trouble in Middle School for printing out an entire FF6 guide from GameFAQs. It had all of the items and their stats, all of the spells, espers, maps etc. It was absolutely massive and the administration was not happy about me using all of that paper and toner. Already printed it, sucks to be them. 3 hole punched it at home and put it in a binder. It was awesome.
That day you learned a very valuable lesson about permission and forgiveness.
It's easier to ask for forgivness, than to ask for permission.
Got it!
Having hypothetically done similar things with work printers, there’s also a lesson to be learned about not using too much paper and ink in one go, space it out over a few restocks.
I did the same! But never got caught.
So I basically started using it the year it was made. I am 40 now, and I was about 10 when I originally found it. Cool.
I remember spending hours printing an entire walkthrough for Secret of Mana on my dot matrix printer back in the day. Got me all the way through to the final boss; but then the SNES itself died mid battle. 😩
RIP Kolanaki's SNES
I loved Secret of Mana and on several playthroughs, the hardest boss, for me, has always been that damn tiger in the witch's castle. When it zig-zagged like a spike ball, the chances of getting wiped were huge. One hit = unconscious.
Kind of similar story of ancient gaming tragedy, I was a young lad going for 100% in FFVII, and after spending however many hours getting everything ready, I saved right by Emerald Weapon, deciding to tackle him right after school the next day. Aaaaand then I came back to everything on the memory card being gone due to some dumb glitch. Still never beat Emerald Weapon.
Before the Internet got social media, we had the GameFAQs voting thing; you'd get head to head popularity contests of coolest characters. Cloud always won, but it was nice to check daily to see who was most popular.
I still use GameFAQs, though. Even after the buyout, the guides are important to those of us RetroAchevement-ing through some older titles.
I once tried writing a guide for Paper Mario, and it was then I realized how much effort, consultation, and typing all of these are. It's in some ways not a surprise that walkthroughs are now just video playthroughs of the game (often involving someone backtracking 3 times as they figure out a puzzle) - that takes a lot less effort than conscious text recorded outside of a game.
I’ve never written a game FAQ but when I’ve done documentation for other things on a computer I’ve found that I prefer recording myself doing the task and then writing the guide while going back through the video. It’s too easy to skip steps otherwise.
And explaining actions in text is much more difficult than just showing them
Even just revising my guide for the new Final Fantasy Tactics remaster is way too big a project for me right now. It's amazing how much work it is.
Big shout-out to the absolute GOAT CyricZ, who has perfect guides for every single Yakuza game in existence.
lol I remember discovering this website as a kid, thinking I could stop buying strategy guides for like 10 to 20 bucks, then proceeding to print like 60 pages at a time. Bless my mom for not complaining about the paper and ink!
Printers worked better back then. Also the cartridges came with more ink lol
Coincidentally, i was just thinking about this site the other day because i was so sick of video walkthroughs!
The only time I like a video walkthrough is for some visual based puzzles because screenshots aren't always precise enough.
The other 99 percent? Screw that, gone a step by step guide damn it!
yhelothar
Got banned from LUE by posting this
When I was a kid, I played Black and White constantly and my dad printed off a complete guide from GameFAQs and put it in a binder with page protectors and everything. It was so awesome.
yup i was using gamefaqs when playing the older generation pokemon games very useful. the subreddit was best for friendsafari.
Had a binder for FFVIII. Printed the entire walkthrough from GameFAQs. Fond memories.
I remember being the first one to make a guide for the game "Bust A Move" (Rhythm dance game). I think it's still there. My own little contribution to the gaming world.
Waa there a Bust a Move rhythm game? Are you thinking of Bust a Groove?
Yes and no. In the US, it was released as "Bust A Groove". The original Japanese release (first release) was "Bust A Move". That's the game I first played and based the FAQ off of.
I feel this; I did the same but for Summoner 2. Man I loved that game. Tried getting back into it once and it was tough :(
Honestly been one of the most useful websites for me over the years.
Good memories. I was a regular on the boards at one point in time, and regularly contributed to the secrets/cheats/bugs sections
I printed out a list of gaps in THPS2 from GameFAQs. I didn't realize it was 80 pages. My mom was really upset. I think I got every single one though.
Buddy recommends this site I've not heard about, Game Facks.
It did not contain game FAQ's.
Also, whitehouse.com, as was the style of the time.
I used to print armored core walkthroughs and take them to my room. I think that's why my parents let me have a computer in my room. So I could use a floppy to bring them over without printing
Do we have backups/mirrors of the guides?
Good question, especially considering that the site is owned by Fandom, Inc. now.
I've seen several sites dedicated to old games go down in just a few recent years.
I have some. I haven’t gone through them just yet. I got them from the Internet Archive, I believe!
I do and will share via PM if you promise to seed!
Absolutely, I've got ~27TB of free space left to fill! I've never seeded soemthing from scratch before though, what do you reccomend?
Edit: Wait, just realized you meant you're going to share the magnet link, not send a direct download - yeah no problem, I always seed :)
I remember the game grumps did a walkthrough of some sonic game and they were going through some guys 10+ year old walkthrough that was really well done. It was hilarious some of the comments the walkthrough person wrote.
I would take the txt guides for RPG games and print them on the laser printers at my high school.
I saved paper by printing them 4 sheets to a single page.
i'd strip out useful information into my own guides. never published any, but they are useful
I was around 8-9 when i was stuck in Sam & Max: Hit the Road for a long time. Restarted the game and got stuck on the same spot. Finally caved and asked my brother how proceed, at which point he showed me a walkthrough. It blew my mind that that was a thing!
Which spot were you stuck on?
I was never able to figure out that you had to put a magnet onto the hand grabber, and then put the hand grabber into the giant ball of yarn to grab something.
I remember that part! Typical point n click moon logic.
But that part was so wholesome. Not to mention physically improbable.
Think there was an extra step to put the hand on the broken grabber too right?
Maybe? It's been about 17 years since my last play through. Maybe I should get it running on my steam deck!
Indeed you should. Scummvm worked really well for monkey Island 3 on it for me
I was stuck on getting the light bulb from the fireplace in their office for far longer than I care to admit. Thanks for the help GaneFAQs.
I don't remember that part! Been a long, long time. Wish it had been remastered like Day of the Tentacle was.
I loaded it onto my Steam Deck not too long ago and my 19 year old son had a blast watching me play it. A few of the jokes did not age well, but over all it is amazing still.
What are some jokes that didn't age well? That's always a thing when playing 90s comedy games. Probably not many games worse than the Leisure Suit Larry series!
Some of the stuff with the conjoined twins. And how they talk about Trixie.
I'll have to watch a playthrough again to jog my memory.
It is funny how GameFAQs is so old I end up going to posts on there about the original releases of games when I'm looking for help with a remake. Props to the site admins for keeping it up this long, so many other resources have withered away over the years.
Escuse me, but I'm aging at just the right rate. Not rapidly, not slowly, but exactly as the universe planned it as we hurtle through time and space on our planet size space ship.
Bring back gameFAQs!
laughs in Nintendo Power magazine
Get off my lawn, kids! 🤣
I hope there's a giant archive of these guides we can download, should anything happen to that site. Any older games you might be stuck on, this is about the only place to go for help.
And I'll tell you now, old games can be obscure as shit. They didn't care if you finished them or not.
There is and I will share it with any and everyone willing to seed it, just PM me.
if it's
b.32768(擑믢憥莔썞羚쑴䡢)then we got it. Unless there’s been an update after 2022-01-03.I still have NES guides up there!
Thank you for your service!
I feel like I could... like I could... like I could... TAKE ON THE WORLD!!
I don't think you should drink that...
I remember finding online guides for the first time back in the days of dial up. It was incredible. So many games I had places where I was stuck and you just accepted that you have to figure it out or you just don’t continue the game.
I think wikis have taken over that niche, at least for more popular games.
Boy the KOTOR gamefaq guides I had bookmarked were something else. I would have missed so much of the games without them. Instead, I got to see every single possible dialogue line in the games.
I remember when Gamefaqs was hated for stealing individual creators' walkthroughs. Obviously, that didn't pan out.
Stealing, as in replacing/faking who the author was?
As i recall, the files were user submitted so it was more of a tacit consent of plagiarism.
Use the staple remover on the gopher
close microwave door
Really sad to see your entire generation give in as it shrinks, and do nothing else with their lives. Next year, the youngest Millenial becomes 30.
Goodbye, friends.
I remember printing out guides from there back in the dialup period of my life.
Perhaps it's because I grew up with adventure puzzle games and point'n'click games, but GameFAQs was always the nuclear option for me.
I much preferred the Universal Hint System - an approach more suited to nudging you towards figuring out the answer for yourself.
There's no denying that it was (and is) a fantastic resource though. Hell, I've even written a guide myself. One of the last bastions of the 90s and 2000s WWW experience.
Fond memories of trying out every single glitch I could find for Pokemon Gens I and II. A lot were a load of crap, but there were a few good ones
My favorite was the Pokemon cloning glitch in Gen 2. If you did it right, you could get all 3 starters and force your rival to have the starter of your choosing. It took a couple hours to do though, because it requires saving right before you get your starter and then not saving again until you're allowed to catch your first Pokemon. And then repeating the process.
I still have a few save state hacking guides floating there :)
Using that site always made me feel more deep shame than any porn site.