What happened to instruction manuals of yore?
1UP has a feature called Instruction Destruction lamenting the loss of creative and thorough game manuals. Early PC games often used the manuals as part of their copy protection, forcing you to navigate the manual hunting down key words; some NES titles came with bundled maps, some 16-bit titles came with walkthroughs and T-shirts. The 32-bit era brought an end to the practice. Confined by the smaller CD jewel cases and looking to counter increased production costs with lower manufacturing costs, publishers offloaded the extras as promotions for pre-ordering (think Metal Gear Saga) or premium-priced super-mega-special editions.
Most manuals offer none of the thrill they used to, when you'd pour over them in the car on the ride home from the game store. The only manuals I can recall enjoying recently were We Love Katamari, which was full of wonderful illustrations of the game's characters, and Shadow of the Colossus, which used simple, elegant images to communicate the game's mechanics.
[Image is from the Legend of Zelda manual, available at The Game Manual Archive]
