EarthBound · Nintendo of America · 1995
Nintendo of America's EarthBound Player's Guide is the most distinctive strategy guide ever produced for a console RPG — packaged in a box with a scratch-and-sniff insert and designed in a tone of knowing suburban absurdism that matched the game's irreverent personality.
The EarthBound Player's Guide, produced by Nintendo of America for the game's 1995 North American launch, is sui generis in strategy guide history. Rather than the conventional spine-bound reference book, the guide was packaged in a cardboard box alongside the game — included in the 'Big Box' retail package at no additional cost. The guide itself featured scratch-and-sniff cards representing locations in the game, a design choice that has made surviving copies collector's items independent of the game they document. The guide's editorial voice matched EarthBound's own irreverent, self-aware tone — it described enemies and locations with the same suburban-American-filtered surrealism that Shigesato Itoi had designed into the game. Nintendo of America's localisation team had performed a significant creative adaptation of the original Japanese text, and the guide was a continuation of that creative effort rather than a neutral documentation exercise.
Remembered as the only strategy guide in history with scratch-and-sniff cards — an absurdist marketing decision that perfectly matched EarthBound's tone and created one of the format's most sought-after collector's items.
Nintendo of America's decision to package the EarthBound guide inside the game box rather than selling it separately reflected their marketing strategy for the title. The EarthBound campaign — designed around the tagline "This Game Stinks" and a print advertising campaign featuring scratch-and-sniff inserts in gaming magazines — positioned the game as deliberately weird, targeting players who valued irreverence over conventional heroism. Bundling the guide was part of this positioning: EarthBound came with everything a player needed, because the game required explaining in a way that the box art alone could not accomplish.
The scratch-and-sniff component of the magazine campaign was extended into the guide itself — specific locations in EarthBound's world were associated with scratch-and-sniff cards in the guide that supposedly represented their smell. The Peaceful Rest Valley card smelled of pine; the Winters environment card smelled cold (or was meant to). The execution was imperfect by the standards of the scratch-and-sniff art form, but the concept was perfect: a game about an American suburb filtered through a Japanese designer's imagination, documented by a guide that invited players to smell it.
EarthBound was a commercial disappointment in North America in 1995. The game sold approximately 140,000 copies — an extremely modest figure for a major SNES RPG, particularly one that Nintendo had supported with an expensive and distinctive marketing campaign. The Big Box packages sat unsold in retail inventory and were heavily discounted or returned to Nintendo. Some stores sold the game without the guide, separating the packaging to move remaining stock.
The combination of commercial failure and an unusual format created the conditions for extreme future scarcity. Big Box copies with the guide intact are rare; complete copies in good condition are exceptionally rare; copies with the scratch-and-sniff cards still functional are rarer still. The guide's collector value — which now routinely exceeds $200 for a good copy — is inversely proportional to its original commercial success. EarthBound's cult rehabilitation in the 2000s and 2010s transformed a commercial failure into one of the most coveted physical game packages in SNES history, with the guide as its most distinctive component.