Golden Age of Arcade Video Games - Strategy Guides

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.