Sometimes I see people nostalgia posting about how they miss the days when games came with manuals in the box, but tbh it's so much better now that games explain how to play within the actual game
Also like. For a lot of these old games, they didn't even put the story inside the game. You had to read it in the manual!
@lizardsquid i think the coolest thing was not the manuals themselves, but rather any extra stuff they used to provide
i have a copy of the manual for "crisis in the kremlin", a DOS game about managing the USSR in its final years, and it basically gives you a pretty solid (with very slight mistakes, and remarkably fair for a product made in the US) course on russian and soviet history
or the GTA games' manuals, which were styled like in-universe guides to their respective regions and had detailed fold-out poster maps