The death of the walkthrough.

In the spring of 1992, arcade owners reported that players were feeding quarter after quarter into Street Fighter II cabinets, trying to finish the game as Ryu without taking a single hit. They were looking for a man named Sheng Long.

He did not exist. The name came from a mistranslation in the game’s English text, which turned the name of Ryu’s rising dragon punch into a mysterious master. The April 1992 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly then ran an April Fools’ item, illustrated with doctored screenshots, explaining how to fight him. The instructions were deliberately absurd, and many readers believed them anyway. The hoax spread through reprints in other magazines and conversations at the machines, and Capcom’s American office fielded enough calls that its phone message pointed callers to the magazine.

It is hard to imagine the same thing happening now. Within an hour a data-miner would have opened the game’s files, a YouTuber would have posted a debunking and a wiki would have added a paragraph under Trivia. The episode belongs to a period that has ended, when knowledge about games was scarce, local and unreliable, and when that scarcity was part of the game itself.

For players who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, information came from three places. The first was the magazine. Nintendo Power launched with a July and August 1988 issue about Super Mario Bros. 2, printed in some 3.6 million copies and mailed to members of the company’s fan club. It ran maps, tips and full strategies, and in its third issue it showed photographic evidence of the Minus World, the endless underwater stage in the original Super Mario Bros. that players reached by slipping through a wall in World 1-2. The magazine ended with its December 2012 issue.

The second source was the telephone. Nintendo’s game counselors took calls from stuck players from 1988 until 2010, and the Minus World was among the tricks callers asked about most. The third source, and the most important, was other children. Secrets moved through schoolyards and sleepovers, and they arrived garbled. Somebody’s older brother had seen a hidden character. Somebody’s cousin knew a code. Half of it was true, and there was no way to know which half without trying.

The strategy guide was the premium version of this economy. Prima Games began in 1990 in a home office in Roseville, California, and for two decades publishers like Prima and BradyGames sold thick, glossy books that mapped every room and listed every item. Buying one was a small confession that you had given up on finding things yourself, and many players owned them anyway.

The internet did not kill that world at once. In November 1995 a programmer named Jeff Veasey founded what became GameFAQs, a central archive for the plain-text guides that fans were writing and posting online. The guides were often astonishing, tens of thousands of words long, written by teenagers for free and credited by name. CNET bought the site in 2003, and it is now owned by Fandom, the company behind a large share of the game wikis that replaced it as the default reference.

Then came video. Once YouTube arrived in 2005, a stuck player no longer had to read a description of a puzzle; he could watch someone solve it. The print guide business could not compete with free, instant and exhaustive. Prima absorbed BradyGames in 2015, and after Penguin Random House decided to close it, a new owner bought the company in 2019 and shut down its print operation. The age of the strategy guide as an object on a shelf was over.

The last stage belongs to speedrunners, who took the collective knowledge of the internet and turned it into a competitive discipline. Speedrun.com, founded in 2014, now keeps leaderboards for tens of thousands of games. Games Done Quick, a charity marathon that began in 2010, has raised more than 59 million dollars by streaming runners who play famous games in ways their designers never intended. Many of the most famous tricks are descendants of the Minus World, glitches that let a player pass through a wall or skip half a game. The difference is that a secret once shared on a playground is now documented, frame by frame, with the exact inputs required.

It would be foolish to romanticize the old arrangement too much. Being stuck for three weeks in a dungeon was not always character-building; sometimes it was just frustrating. The searchable world is better for players with less time, for players with disabilities and for anyone who simply wants to see the ending. Speedrunning has created one of the most inventive and generous communities in the hobby.

But something was lost, and it was not merely difficulty. When knowledge about a game was scarce, the game extended past the screen. It lived in conversation, in trading, in the half-believed story told at lunch. The friend who knew the trick was a person, and the trick was a reason to visit. A walkthrough on a wiki is more accurate than a rumor, but no one ever went to a friend’s house to read a wiki together.

Scarcity also preserved a kind of agency. When a player found a secret alone, the discovery was his. When he looks it up, he is following instructions, and the experience of playing becomes the experience of executing a plan someone else wrote. Many players now open a guide before they are even stuck, out of fear of missing something. The game becomes a checklist, and the checklist is written by a stranger.

Some designers have responded by building games around the fact that players talk. FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls, released in 2009, let players leave short messages on the ground for strangers in other games, some helpful and some deliberately misleading, and the studio has kept the system in its later games. The effect is a rumor mill built into the software: advice from people you will never meet, which you must decide whether to trust.

That may be the most useful lesson for players as well. The choice is not between ignorance and the wiki; it is about when to look. A player can decide to finish a game blind, or to wait a week before searching, or to ask a friend before asking the internet. These are small acts of control over one’s own experience. The secret is always there to be found now. The only question left is whether you want someone else to find it for you.