EarthBound · SNES · Nintendo of America · 1995 · 128 pages
EarthBound's North American release came packaged with a 128-page Players' Guide masquerading as a manual, complete with scratch-and-sniff stickers, a full walkthrough, and a tone that matched the game's surreal humor perfectly.
Recognizing that EarthBound's offbeat humor and unconventional structure needed an equally unconventional introduction, Nintendo of America produced what amounted to a full-length strategy guide and bundled it in the box at no extra cost. The document ran to 128 pages and included a complete walkthrough, enemy data, and item lists alongside scratch-and-sniff stickers meant to evoke the game's gross-out moments. The writing voice matched Ness's adventure precisely — self-aware, absurdist, and frequently addressed directly to the player. It was a landmark piece of game marketing that acknowledged the buyer's intelligence while embracing the product's weirdness without apology.
Being the only North American SNES pack-in that functioned as a complete strategy guide, scratch-and-sniff novelty, and comedy piece simultaneously.
EarthBound sold poorly in North America despite — or perhaps because of — its expensive "This game stinks" ad campaign. Nintendo's marketing division knew the game was a difficult sell: a Japanese RPG set in a fictionalized 1990s America, starring a boy with a baseball bat, fought largely with dialogue rather than swords. The lavish pack-in guide was an attempt to lower the barrier to entry.
By including a complete walkthrough, Nintendo removed the risk of a player bouncing off the game's deliberate strangeness and returning it to the rental store. Every puzzle, every obscure trigger, every hidden item was documented. The strategy guide was the safety net that let players commit to the experience.
The gamble did not save the game commercially, but it produced an artifact that became a collector's obsession. Loose cartridges are common; complete-in-box copies with the guide intact are among the most sought-after SNES items on the secondary market.
Most strategy guides of the era were written in a dry, encyclopedic register. The EarthBound Players' Guide was not. Its authors — working under Nintendo's localization team — adopted the same irreverent, fourth-wall-aware tone that made the game itself distinctive. Tips were delivered with winks. Enemy descriptions were affectionate parodies of RPG tropes.
The guide frequently acknowledged its own existence as a guide. It told players to put it down and try things themselves before consulting it. It inserted jokes into item descriptions and made the act of reading a walkthrough feel like part of the EarthBound experience rather than a departure from it.
This approach has aged better than the game's television commercials. Where the ads tried to market weirdness at arm's length, the guide leaned into it. It remains one of the few pieces of official game documentation that players describe as worth reading for entertainment independent of the game.