When I was a kid, it was tough for me to get the video games I wanted. They were super-expensive (relatively speaking), and television and magazines kept telling me that they were super cool and super amazing and super fun and made playing video games seem like a thing that I just had to do.
But, when the NES was the current generation, the games cost a lot of money, and since I didn't have a job, I couldn't buy very many. But what I could buy were books about video games, and that's pretty much the same thing, right?
Well, no, but that would ruin the premise of this article, so let's pretend for a bit, eh?
I don't remember how I initially came across the How To Win At Nintendo Games series, but I think the first book I read was Book 2. Looking back now, it's interesting to see the quality of this thing, or the lack thereof. The writing quality isn't all that great, there are no pictures, just long passages of text with the occasional attempt at humor, mostly landing flat, but that didn't matter. When I was squarely in the target market for this book, I loved it. I ate up every page, and read and reread the books until the covers fell off and the binding gave up.
I still have my original Book 2. It's missing the cover and several pages from the back, but I've since then managed to get two more copies (somehow) that are in much better shape.
When they were new, I only ever really had copies of books 2 and 3. I knew that there had to be a book 1 (obviously), and I had heard years later that a book 4 existed, but I never was able to find it until last week when one appeared on Amazon.
It's no wonder I didn't know that book 4 existed, since the cover is so radically different, I probably thought it was another book series if I ever accidentally saw it anywhere. I haven't read it yet, but I expect that it's the same thing as the other books in the series: a brief overview of what the game is about, how to play, and a verbal walkthrough of a portion of the game.
The thing about these walkthroughs, though, is that at the time I hadn't played many of these games, so I took the descriptions in the games and let my imagination run with them. Yeah, sure, now games like Adventure Island don't look as great as contemporary games (and even then, it looked cartoony), but using the theatre of the mind to 'play' the games this way was... well, it was interesting. I created versions of these games that did not exist and could not exist, and played them vicariously through the book dozens of times over.
I admit that it does sound a little bit silly to admit that, and it would be easy for me to chalk it up to just plain not having much money and maximizing my fun or whatever.
But the reality is that I loved it. And even though the games that I concocted from the descriptions were different than the ones that I ultimately played, I usually ended up enjoying both versions. Except for games like Ring King. That's a hard game to make exciting no matter what.
Jeff Rovin gets a lot of vitriol because he also wrote a lot of awful 'joke' books and a lot of not-so-great fiction and nonfiction, or he gets derision because he (allegedly) had kids that he knew (probably of friends and neighbors) play the games for him, give him notes, and then he'd compile them into these books. Eh, maybe, maybe not. It doesn't really matter. He basically wrote a super-early version of something like GameFAQs, and if he used the raw information provided by kids to do it, I'm going to assume that they probably got something out of the deal (like their names in print at the start of the book, and a lot of video games to play, obviously).
So, I'm looking forward to going through book 4 and inventing my own versions of the games within, even though I've, by now, played most of them in physical form already. It'll be a great inversion to see how the imagined version, based on the writings of a bunch of kids, filtered through an adult, stacks up against the physical version this time, instead of the other way around.