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.
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.
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.
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?
I’m not convinced the market for strategy guides was “booming” by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I’d wager due to GameFAQs.
I’d imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there’s still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don’t when they’re crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.
OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Prior to Gamefaqs, I myself was perusing Gamewinners.com…a similar forum site lol