I still prefer these to seo optimized, ad riddled articles with videos that are somehow 8 minutes long to show a 5-10 second part of the game.

These often were solo written guides, too. Not wikis.

Somewhere, a company employs one of these people, and they have the best documentation you've ever seen.

I used so much printer paper and ink printing a bunch of those out. They were indeed saviors. Also another great example, along with open source, of people helping each other out for free, and beyond their local tribe, too.

When you dust off an old game and go look for guides.

Then see one you wrote.

Back in 97 my older sister got a both babe job at E3 and got extra tickets for me and my mom to take me. This is back when it was strictly a trade conference and not really open to the public. I was waiting in line for a new Gameboy game when a dude overhead me rambling to my mom about the Brady guides I loved to read so much back then (my mom is a patient saint haha) when a dude in line interrupted me and told my mom about his website that had free guides for all the new games online. My mom was pretty excited about free guides and he handed her his card which I looked at eagerly, it was Jeff Veasey, the creator of gamefaqs.com.

I can't tell you how much of my parents toner i burnt through over the years printing from that website, it was probably cheaper to just buy the guides haha. Still one of my all time favorite sites.

Oh yeah that Gameboy game I was waiting to see was some new Japanese monster game called Pokemon.

So many things are hard to find on Google now, like I'd type all of the relevant keywords but nothing actually relevant would come up except for some ancient GameFAQs document complete with the ASCII titles 😂

I was always impressed by how creative the artwork made out of text were. Yeah, most were made by a program that converted pics to text, but that was automating something that was already being done and they had to pick and choose art that would convert clearly.

Much more detailed information that any "gaming site" produces now, that's for sure

I have fond memories of AbsoluteSteve’s FF7/8 guides, which were infinitely better than the official guides

I remember printing these out, too. They were usually hundreds of pages. And we still had a printer that used paper with the holes on the side. Shit took forever. Just grrrntchchgrrrntchchgrrrntchchgrrrntchch (printer sounds) all day.

I often do miss the internet of the old days.

Hosting a modern day gamefaqs would cost $500 per year or so.

I guess a wiki would be easier to offer version control, links and images for the author.

Maybe that would be $1000 a year.

I used to have a giant one of these walkthrough guides printed out for Might and Magic 7 when I was a kid. Those guides were great. I miss Acromage :(

How else would we finish ogre battle with all the cool units?

Is there an archive for those old GameFAQs?

I loved Dan Simpson's walkthrough for all the BioWare/Black Isle Studios games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, etc.

I once wrote such a guide for a BBS game. Must've been 30 years ago. Man, I wish I could find that again. But I just saw you can play the game online: https://legendreddragon.net/

I recently went back and played the PC CD-ROM DOS game Star Trek - The Next Generation: A Final Unity. The GameFAQs guide for it was originally written in 1995 and had a CompuServ email address. 😱 The ancient texts certainly got me out of a tough spot with a floating platform puzzle.

I remember I used to print these guides out on Epson inkjet printers in the early 2000s and wondered why I never had any ink left to print my homework out

Made it through Legend of Zelda Ocarina of time on N64 because of these - I remember the Forest temple and Water temple being doozeys!

Tfw you know what to do, you just aren't co-ordinated or fast enough to do it.