The history of game hints pages, before the internet took over

I’m stuck on Starfield. There are a million mission icons dotted around the screen, and I keep getting my ass handed to me in space by a bunch of pirates. Fortunately, it’s 2023. I grab my smartphone, and within a few seconds, I’m looking at a page from Eurogamer’s excellent guide to the Bethesda space epic. Ah, I press that button – now, only my current mission icon shows up. And I need to upgrade my ship. Or buy a better one. Here are the best ones, how much they cost and where to get them. Job done.

Rewind almost 40 years. I’m stumped on Ultimate’s latest isometric epic, Pentagram. In typical Ultimate style, the instructions are eloquent but useless. I’m wandering around, exploring the two-colour world, occasionally jumping over blocks and avoiding the odd nasty. Eurogamer is just a twinkle in its founder’s eyes, and in any case, how would I access it? The concept of networking computers was gathering pace, but it would be many years before the internet, as we know it today, would be available to proles such as me.

So, we networked, old school style and tips and tricks were swapped in the playground. But that didn’t always work, especially with tougher games like Pentagram. There was one avenue left. Our internet, our network of (in my case) Spectrum fans, eagerly engaging with the experts and each other: the games magazines.

In 1981, author Tom Hirschfeld released one of the first tips books, How To Master Video Games. “I remember reading that and thinking, ‘holy shit, you can write about these video games and do tips for them,'” grins Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall, one of the earliest games tips writers in the UK. “So when I came home from winning the arcade championship in 1983 and having this legitimacy of being a good player, I thought, well, I’ll start writing hints and tips.” At the time, the UK’s premier games magazine was Computer & Video Games – or C&VG. “The first thing I wrote was a guide to playing the Atari arcade game Pole Position,” continues Rignall. “I’d mastered the game over the summer and wrote this corner-by-corner guide. There was no template; it was just about how to drive around the track along with specific hints.”