alessandro800 gamers tried to beat an '80s adventure without a walkthrough—only 2 did - Only .25% of players completed the AGAT, the Adventure Game Aptitude Test, designed by fiendish developer Woe Industries.
VerilyFemmeWell, yeah.
Game companies also sold strategy guides at the time. They’re designed to be obtuse. I’m pretty sure the full walkthrough for Leisure Suit Larry 1 is only 2 paragraphs or something.
The actual steps to the end are short, there’s just always a puzzle where you have to use a rubber chicken with a bar of soap to make a helicopter or some shit. I love adventure games though, I’m just a walkthrough baby.
There were even quite a few games from the 80s and 90s that required you to use the manual in order to play with translations, instructions, sometimes even hidden codes to move forward.
MinnesotaGoddamthere would almost always be a moment where you’d use the manual to answer a password and that was their copy protection. that kind of copy protection continued into the 90s
DrasglafWe had a Mickey game that came with a dark maroon piece of paper with a bunch of Mickey poses on it, each one had a number or letter code (it would show a pose and you had to give it the code for the pose to start the game). The black ink on dark maroon paper was intended to prevent photocopying.
We also had this F1 racing game that had a bunch of F1 history in its manual and would ask F1 history trivia to get into the game.