In many cases, of course, publishers were simply filling out space in a book which, if it ran to enough pages, could serve as a handy form of copy protection – ‘Key in the the third word on the fifth row of page 42’ and so on – but for some games, the manual was a genuine opportunity to creatively expand upon the games’ narratives, filling in character and plot backstory and immersing the player in their worlds before they even booted up. And in a few select instances, the books contained in those boxes would contain content that was only tangentially or conceptually linked to the games.

Geoff Crammond’s F1 simulator Grand Prix 2, for example, came with a 150 page book which, beyond the installation and gameplay instructions, actually served as an all-purpose guide to F1 in general. Aside from detailed descriptions of the various tracks, and driver and team biographies (even the addresses of the teams’ headquarters!), it even included a detailed guide of how exactly to brake and overtake in every kind of corner a race track could offer. As realistic a simulation as Crammond’s game offered, this was surely almost entirely useless information – races in the game could be won quite easily without it – but it did help to make players feel like they were in some way training to become a ‘real’ F1 driver.

As detailed as Grand Prix 2’s manual was, however, it was still somewhat dry – still more of a technical reference manual than anything. SimCity 2000’s manual, however, was something else entirely. It’s interesting enough that the instructions themselves were so lengthy – emphasising just how unusual the growing simulation and resource management genre was to players at that point – but even moreso that the book was practically a work of art in itself. The Rasmussen quotation at the beginning was a statement of intent – as was the fact that the manual’s author, Michael Bremer, was actually named in the credits.

The 140 pages that followed were, at their core, an in-depth guide in how to play SimCity 2000 – but they extended far beyond simple rote descriptions of the gameplay mechanics. Aside from describing the in-game functions, they offered wider conceptual advice on the building of cities in general – and in an unusual departure from the accepted style of a manual, were written in an engaging and entertaining fashion by Bremer, who would even break into the first-person on occasion. ‘Take a moment and open each of the menus, revealing their hidden glory,’ he would advise; or, later, ‘As your city grows, there will be other things that you’ll just have to find out for yourself, because I won’t tell you. Well, OK. I’ll tell you one more…’

As a continuation of the fact that the SimCity games themselves stemmed from developer Will Wright’s burgeoning interest in urban planning, the SimCity 2000 manual also went a step further in giving players a basic grounding in sociological philosophies. An architect named Richard Bartlett selected ‘a series of vignettes about cities and city planning’ to be littered throughout the book, which were intended to ‘give a historical and humanistic perspective to planning that you may wish to incorporate into your city design.’ For example, as the opening vignette read, ‘A city is many things, but it is above all a storehouse of human characteristics.’