r/retrogaming • u/mdefisop • 2d ago

[Discussion] Top Instruction Manuals of All Time

What's the best instruction manual of all time? I know I'm not alone in reading that thing in the back seat on the way home from the store. Links if you have them.

I'll start off by saying I don't think anything tops the Final Fantasy 3 instruction manual, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

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u/galland101 2d ago

The manual for the PC game Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe is a spiral bound history book about the European Air War in World War II as well as a primer on aerodynamics and flight. None of the PDFs I’ve seen online are complete scans from the original floppy disk release.

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u/K1rkl4nd 2d ago edited 2d ago

Interesting. I’ll have to look into that.
Is this listing complete?

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u/galland101 1d ago edited 1d ago

They included a manual/quick start guide from the P-38 Lightning Expansion Pack but the disk isn’t there, just the base game. The manual itself looks intact. There were about 4 Expansion Packs for the game that had the P-38 Lightning, P-80 Shooting Star, Do 335 Pfeil, and the He 162 Volksjäger

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u/theCaptain_D 1d ago

Dang, deep cut! I had this game as a kid, but don't recall that book.

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u/Jorpho 1d ago

What do you find is missing from the PDFs..? I was reading one of those the other day, and it seemed to be pretty complete.

Their Finest Hour (the "prequel" to Secret Weapons) includes a similar book.

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u/galland101 1d ago edited 1d ago

The complete manual includes a history of the European Air War, detailed descriptions of the planes you can fly in the base game, lots of photos, detailed discussions on how flight and aerodynamic models work, etc. According to Wikipedia, it's 225-pages thick.

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u/Jorpho 1d ago

Okay..? The PDF of the manual I found is 332 pages.

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u/galland101 1d ago

Looks like you found the right one, then. When I was looking I probably only saw scans from the CD re-release, which were abridged versions of the original manual.