GameFAQs was definitely responsible for anyone knowing the fatalities in Mortal Kombat games for a while. I was using it plenty in the mid 90s.
MudMan@fedia.io 21 hours ago
Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?
I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
MudMan@fedia.io 19 hours ago
I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I’m sure there were other sources before it ended up on GameFAQs, but it was a one-stop shop for all the stuff you would have found in magazines and strategy guides, and it was free. And that was the difference. The one kid on the playground who knew about GameFAQs would share, and internet adoption only went up over time. GameFAQs is almost solely responsible for strategy guides and hint hotlines becoming obsolete.
MudMan@fedia.io 18 hours ago
I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Prior to Gamefaqs, I myself was perusing Gamewinners.com…a similar forum site lol
nocturne@slrpnk.net 20 hours ago
The first guide i know i got from GameFAQs was Star Wars Masters of Teräs Käsi, which came out in '97. I may have used it before that.
I also had printed out game guides (on the supersede white and green paper) in the early 80s.
Damage@feddit.it 18 hours ago
unlike many printed guides, gamefaqs guides came out some time after game release, because average people didn’t have preview versions of the game to play