i miss video game manuals sm i swear to god. reading those was genuinely almost as fun as actually playing the game
like just. being a kid and being on your way home from gamestop or something, or you were somewhere else or had to be somewhere else and you couldn't play the game yet, but you had the game case or brought the manual to read, and you got to see all the fun graphic design and soak in all the information about the game and its world that the manual had, and you got to vividly imagine what the game would be like. sometimes what you imagined was better than the actual game! and that was okay, because the act of imagining it was just as fun! hell, even when you're older, there's just something about reading those old manuals that can light a fire in your heart.
physical video games slowly dying is a fucking travesty for many reasons, many of which are more important than this, but something about the quiet death of the video game manual as the spot for them in the cases eventually got taken over by lazy, single-sheet printouts of DLC codes and shit like that, and then by the end, nothing at all, is just particularly really fucking sad to me and really reflects how the industry "evolved" i think. as much as the corpos might want me to i will never ever think reading fucking wikia is anywhere close to a substitute for good, real manuals (though indie wikis are a vast improvement).
i don't think digital manuals really have quite the same magic to them--there's something to be said about how different the experience of reading on a screen and reading something physical is--but i would still absolutely LOVE to see (more?) indie devs start shipping their games with manuals crafted with the same level of love and care that they were before the mid-2010s. it would probably be a LOT of effort but i think it would be deeply rewarding if resources allowed. hell if i was a game dev i would honestly sell physical prints and maybe a pack of other little old-school feelies as merch if i was able (lot of if's, but still)