In October 2020, I reported on a project who was trying to find all the Super Nintendo manuals out there, scan them, and upload them to the internet. I’m happy to report that in July 2022, the project has now reached a major milestone – and for many of you reading this, this is the major milestone.
When I released this featurethe team (including Arachness, BuffaloJoe, Timber, SNES Central, and Grant Kirkhart) working on the project—led by streamer and archivist Peebs– had uploaded around 600 scans and there were only around 100 manuals left until they had scanned the instructions for every game ever released in the West during the life of the console.
That was good progress, but also, the deeper they got into the SNES library, the harder it was going to be to find booklets for the weirder and rarer games in the collection. Then, last week:
This means that the Project Archive now has an English manual for every Super Nintendo game ever officially released in the language. Sometimes it’s the North American version, sometimes it’s the PAL (European/Australasian) version, sometimes it’s both if there were differences beyond cover art, spelling and addresses postal on the back (like the way Against 3 has been called Super Probotector in PAL regions).
That’s not quite every game ever released in the WestSince some games may get different unique releases depending on the language market, but since this is an English website, I thought this was an important milestone for our readers to know!
And it’s still very close. The team is only one game away from achieving “every Western textbook ever” by a single version: an original analysis of the single German language version of Daze before Christmas (although they have a translated version of the rare English version of Mega Drive in case anyone needs the info).
After that, however, it seems their work is never done. Even when every manual was scanned and downloaded, some games, including many RPGs, had important information written elsewhere, such as on separate cards/posters, so they seek to download and scan those where possible as well . They also have a section of the Super Famicom manual to go through too.
If you want to take a look at the full library, or just bookmark it for a future time in need, it is available herealthough you can also simply search for a particular game on the Internet Archive and it will go up there too. And for something more action-packed, besides collecting their manuals Peebs is also working on the SNES library and trying to beat every game on Twitch (At last count, he was down to 47!)
