If you grew up in the 90s, you probably owned a Super Nintendo (SNES for short) or spent time at your best friend's house who was lucky enough to have one! It's a legendary console of that decade that sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. The second-hand market for this console is still very lively! And it's the same for games. You can still find plenty to complete your collection. But on the other hand, much rarer items, the manuals provided with the games have not all survived these last 30 years!
Luckily for us, some crazy enthusiasts have decided to collect and preserve the Super Nintendo game manuals in digital format!
By the way, don't hesitate to go watch this video which covers 80s video game ads. A real gem.
A digital collection of Super Nintendo game manuals
In a physical edition game, the first thing that usually disappears is the box. Only a few (very smart) aficionados fight to preserve the boxes of the games they buy in the best possible condition. Then, in general, the manuals suffer the same fate. By hanging around, they end up tearing, they lose their pages, no longer look like anything and end their short career in a trash can... And a few decades later, it is with bitter regret that we realize the value taken by these objects that have become collector's items.
But that doesn't matter, if you can't get rich by reselling a collection that left too soon (RIP), you will be able to find these famous Super Nintendo game manuals in digital version.
The streamer Peebs has indeed carried out a painstaking work to try to find as many SNES game manuals as possible in order to digitize them and make them available to the public on the Internet Archive site. Helped by a hundred people, he is thus continuing the work carried out by another "web archivist" known under the pseudonym K1rkl4nd.
Of the 1 games officially released on Nintendo's legendary console, Peebs and K757rkl1nd managed to find 4 manuals available in PDF. This corresponds to all of games released in english on the Super Nintendo.
Even though there are currently only English versions of the manuals for these games, we are quickly tempted to browse the list to find the games that marked our childhood. And there are some, like Street Fighter II, THE fighting game par excellence or the unmissable Zelda A Link to the Past.
What strikes me when I review these manuals is the quality of the content. If we take the Zelda manual, it includes about fifty pages, with a lot of information about the game, the monsters, the controls... Today, this type of manual no longer exists. Information about the games ends up on fan sites and other wikis and it doesn't have the same charm!
The top 10 best-selling games on Super Nintendo, all here!
This collection is relatively well stocked, and includes in particular the manuals for the 10 best-selling games on the Super Nintendo:
- Super Mario World
- Super Mario All-Stars
- Donkey Kong Country
- Super Mario Kart
- Street Fighter 2
- Donkey Kong Country 2
- The Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past
- Super Mario World 2
- Street Fighter 2 Turbo
- Donkey Kong Country 3
If you have any anecdotes or if you simply want to list your favorite Super Nintendo games, do not hesitate to do so in the comments below!
Access the Super Nintendo game manual collection on the Internet Archive
Article updated on January 7, 2025 by Byothe
