Manuals have long been a pet peeve of mine. When I buy a game, the first thing I do is look through the manual and decide whether it’s going to be a useful resource. If so, the manual ends up sitting on my coffee table so I can reference it quickly. If not, it goes back in the box and never again sees the light of day. Far too many fall into the second category.
There are several schools of thought regarding manuals. The first is the minimalist school, whose guidelines state that manuals should have only the most vital information and shouldn’t keep you from getting right to the game. The second school, the one to which I subscribe, states that manuals should actually add to the fantasy of the game. They should have complete gameplay and control information, of course, and they should add enough flourish to make them interesting. Fortunately, Microsoft Game Studios has a similar opinion on manuals.
For Amped 2, we worked with Snowboarder Magazine to create a manual that looks as if it were an issue of the magazine. Almost a year before the game’s scheduled shipping date, our planning guru, Brenner Adams, made arrangements with Mike Nusenow at Snowboarder Magazine to use some of its content, styles, and photos in our manual.
Based on the magazine’s unique style, custom layouts were created for every page of the manual, and the end result was an artful, flamboyant, and, above all, useful manual.
Our overriding goal with the Amped 2 manual was to make it as useful as possible. To do this, while still maintaining the sort of content you would expect to see for an extreme sports game, we streamlined some of the more traditional content.
For example, when it comes to professional rider bios, instead of devoting several pages to just talking about the pros, we show them in their element. We attempted to incorporate them seamlessly into the manual. Our planner procured dozens of sweet riding photos from companies like K2, Burton, Premier, Ride, and Volcom. These shots were spliced into the layout of the manual with short bios of each rider to further the illusion that the manual is a special edition of Snowboarder.
Another staple of Snowboarder Magazine that we brought to the Amped 2 manual is its editorials. InSnowboarder, these sections have long been the voice of snowboard enthusiasts and pros who just love to talk about the sport. In the Amped 2 manual, each main section starts with a brief editorial page. The editorials are presented as breaks in the action of the manual and talk about the rise to snowboarding fame, what pro boarders bring to the sport, and what amateur riders can expect on the mountain.
The icing on the cake, though, was being able to use the October Snowboarder cover for the cover of the Amped 2 manual. It really brought the piece together and gave a great flavor to the whole project.
Microsoft chose to dramatically raise the bar on quality for its manuals, and this bar continues to be raised by the print and writing teams that Microsoft Game Studios employs. With luck, maybe some of the other companies will follow, and then we can all look forward to manuals that are as creative as the games they describe.
