Metroid · NES · Nintendo of America · 1987 · 24 pages
The Metroid manual referred to Samus Aran as "he", keeping one of gaming's great twists intact: players who finished the game quickly enough discovered that the armoured bounty hunter was a woman.
Metroid rewarded fast completion with a surprise: finish the game in under five hours and Samus Aran removes the Power Suit, revealing that the bounty hunter players had controlled all along was a woman. Nintendo protected that twist on paper as well as in the game. The North American manual described Samus as a cyborg-like hunter with a mysterious past and referred to the character as "he", so readers had no reason to suspect the reveal. The rest of the booklet set the scene — the Space Pirates' theft of the Metroid organism from the Galactic Federation, and their fortress on the planet Zebes ruled by Mother Brain — but it was the deliberate pronoun that made the manual part of the game's most famous surprise.
Using a single pronoun to keep one of gaming's best-known twists hidden from players who read the instructions.
The Metroid manual spends its story pages on the Space Pirates, the Galactic Federation and the Metroid organism, and introduces Samus Aran as a lone hunter about whom little is known. Crucially, it calls Samus "he". For readers, the armoured figure on screen was simply a man in a suit.
That small choice turned the ending into a genuine shock. Players who finished quickly enough watched the helmet come off — and the manual, far from spoiling the moment, had helped set it up.
The Power Suit gave Samus an imposing, alien presence in Metroid's environments, and hid the character's identity as a matter of course. The decision to reward quick completions with the unarmoured Samus turned that into one of the medium's earliest twists.
In the pre-internet era, the box contents were the canon, and the canon said "he". Players who finished fast discovered the truth; players who did not often learned it only years later. The Metroid manual is a small, early example of game documentation being used to manage a surprise rather than explain a system.