Strategy Guides
The period saw the emergence of a gaming media, publications dedicated to video games, in the form of video game journalism and strategy guides. The enormous popularity of video arcade games led to the very first video game strategy guides; these guides (rare to find today) discussed in detail the patterns and strategies of each game, including variations, to a degree that few guides seen since can match. "Turning the machine over"—making the score counter overflow and reset to zero—was often the final challenge of a game for those who mastered it, and the last obstacle to getting the highest score.
Some of these strategy guides sold hundreds of thousands of copies at prices ranging from $1.95 to $3.95 in 1982 (equivalent to between $4.52 and $9.15 in 2011). That year, Ken Uston's Mastering Pac-Man sold 750,000 copies, reaching No. 5 on B. Dalton's mass-market bestseller list, while Bantam's How To Master the Video Games sold 600,000 copies, appearing on the The New York Times mass-market paperback list. By 1983, 1.7 million copies of Mastering Pac-Man had been printed.
Read more about this topic: Golden Age Of Arcade Video Games
Famous quotes containing the words strategy and/or guides:
“Our strategy in going after this army is very simple. First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it.”
—Colin Powell (b. 1937)
“Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives—from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango—with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to- date scripts for actors on the tourists’ stage.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)