GameFAQs and the Hundred-Page Printout

I was stuck on the Water Temple for five days. Five real, calendar days of raising water and lowering water and swimming through the same corridors and hitting the same dead ends. I was eleven. I had no pride left. I would have called a psychic hotline if I thought they could help me find the small key under the floating platform in the central tower. And then my friend Tyler told me about a website.

"GameFAQs," he said, spelling it out carefully at the lunch table. "Dot com. F-A-Q-s. It has walkthroughs for everything."

That afternoon I sat down at the family computer, typed the URL into Netscape Navigator, and my life changed. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. In a quiet, practical way. Like finding out the library exists.

The Sacred Texts

GameFAQs was the ugliest useful website on the entire internet. No graphics. No colors, really. Just blue hyperlinks on white space, organized by console and then alphabetically by game. You'd click through to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and find a list of twenty different walkthroughs, all plain text, all written by people with names like DarkMaster64 and ZeldaFreak1987 and Marshmallow.

You clicked one and got a wall of monospaced text that went on forever. But at the very top, before any of the actual useful information, there was always an ASCII art header.

  ==========================================
  THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME
  COMPLETE WALKTHROUGH / FAQ  v3.1
  By: Marshmallow
  Last Updated: 01/22/1999
  ==========================================

Somebody sat there and made that with a keyboard. With hyphens and equal signs and forward slashes. It served absolutely no functional purpose. It was decoration. It was a title page. And it was beautiful in the way that only something totally unnecessary can be.

Thousands of strangers doing meticulous, unpaid technical writing because they loved a video game and believed knowledge should be free.

Below the header came the table of contents, which you navigated using Ctrl+F and a set of search codes the author had invented. Something like "Type [WTR4] to jump to the Water Temple section." It was a navigation system built out of nothing but text and trust. And it worked. It worked perfectly.

The Printout That Started a War

Here was the problem. The family computer was upstairs in the living room. The N64 was downstairs in the basement, hooked up to the old TV your parents didn't want anymore. You couldn't exactly read the walkthrough and play the game at the same time. Not unless you did something drastic.

You printed it.

All of it.

The Marshmallow walkthrough for Ocarina of Time ran close to 200 pages. You hit File, Print, All Pages, and walked away from the HP DeskJet while it began its slow, grinding work. You went downstairs and played something else for a while. You came back twenty minutes later and it was still going. The paper tray was half empty. The thing was warm.

Your mom found out two days later when she tried to print a recipe and nothing came out. No paper. No ink. The cartridge was bone dry. She asked what happened and you said you didn't know, which was a lie so transparent it barely qualified as an attempt. The conversation that followed included the phrase "do you have any idea how much printer ink costs" and the answer - which you did not say out loud - was apparently more than the video game itself.

Some kids had the foresight to print only the section they needed. Just the Water Temple pages. Just the Gold Chocobo breeding guide. But that required a level of discipline most of us did not possess. You printed the whole thing because what if you needed it later. You stapled it in sections and kept it on the floor next to the TV like a reference manual for your life.

Before There Was GameFAQs

The weird thing is how recent it all felt, even then. GameFAQs launched in 1995. Before that - and even during the early years, if you didn't have internet access yet - getting help with a video game was an ordeal.

The hint line. Nintendo's was 1-900-288-0707. A buck fifty a minute, charged directly to your parents' phone bill. You'd call, navigate a voice menu, and eventually reach a real person - a game counselor, Nintendo called them - who would walk you through whatever section had you stuck. The problem was that you were ten and you couldn't just dial a 900 number without consequences. Explaining a six-dollar charge on the phone bill because you couldn't figure out how to get past Bongo Bongo in the Shadow Temple was a specific kind of shame.

The strategy guide. You could buy an official guide at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton, if your town still had one. Prima Games put out those thick paperbacks with the slightly off-color screenshots and the maps that were almost helpful. Brady Games was better. And the official Nintendo Power guides - the ones with the heavy, glossy pages and the gorgeous artwork - those were the luxury option. Twelve to fifteen bucks. You had to convince your parents that a book about a video game was still a book, which was a harder sell than you'd think.

Nintendo Power magazine. The monthly lifeline. Except the coverage was always three months behind whatever game you were stuck on, and the walkthrough section would cover the first half of the game in beautiful detail and then end with "the rest is up to you, adventurer!" Like they'd run out of pages. Which they probably had.

The Message Board Wars

GameFAQs wasn't just walkthroughs. It had message boards, and the message boards were chaos.

Every game had its own board. Every board had its own culture, its own regulars, its own simmering feuds. The Final Fantasy VII board was locked in an eternal Aeris-versus-Tifa debate that generated enough heat to power a small city. The Pokemon board was consumed by the question of whether you could actually catch Mew by using Strength on the truck near the S.S. Anne. Someone always claimed their cousin had done it. Someone else always called them a liar.

"my uncle works at nintendo and he said its real"

"your uncle doesnt work at nintendo"

"yes he does look it up"

Nobody ever looked it up.

The arguments ran in circles for weeks. Months. The same points, restated with increasing hostility, by people whose usernames had numbers in them because the original version was already taken. SephirothFan99 versus CloudStrife2002 versus some kid named TruthTeller who had joined the board three days ago just to tell everyone they were wrong about everything. Moderation existed in theory. In practice, it was the Wild West with a typing speed requirement.

The same arguments, restated with increasing hostility, by people whose usernames had numbers in them because the original version was already taken.

Myst and the Adults Who Needed Help Too

Myst was different. Myst was the game your parents had, the one installed on the family Packard Bell next to Print Shop and Encarta. It was beautiful and eerie and your parents bought it because it looked like something smart people would play. It was the video game equivalent of having a copy of A Brief History of Time on your coffee table.

And nobody could beat it. Not you, not your parents, not the neighbor who said he was "really into computers." The GameFAQs walkthrough for Myst read differently from the teenage-authored ones. Better grammar. No ASCII art. It had the clinical tone of assembly instructions. "Proceed to the dock. Note the number of marker switches. Toggle the third switch." Because Myst's puzzles were the kind where even knowing the answer made you think, how was anyone supposed to figure that out? You weren't. You were supposed to buy the hint book. Or, eventually, find GameFAQs.

Free Knowledge, Freely Given

What I keep thinking about, all these years later, is the generosity of the whole thing.

These walkthroughs took hundreds of hours to write. The really comprehensive ones - the ones with every side quest, every hidden item, every alternate ending - were genuine feats of documentation. And the people who wrote them got nothing for it. No ad revenue. No Patreon. No subscriber count. Their reward was a username on a website and the knowledge that somewhere in suburban America, a frustrated kid was finally going to beat the game because of their work.

There was always a version history at the top, right after the ASCII art. "v1.0 - Initial walkthrough. v1.1 - Added Chocobo breeding section per reader emails. v1.2 - Corrected item location in Wutai based on feedback from NinjaCloud." They were maintaining these documents. Updating them. Responding to emails from strangers. It was open-source software before most of us knew what open-source meant.

The internet in 1998 ran on this energy. This belief that if you knew something, you should share it, and that sharing it was its own reward. GameFAQs was the purest expression of that idea I ever saw. Just people who'd figured out the hard parts, writing it all down so the rest of us could get through.

I found a stack of faded inkjet printouts in a box at my parents' house last year. Yellowed paper, pale blue-gray text, a rusted staple in the corner. The Marshmallow Ocarina of Time walkthrough. Or the first sixty pages of it, anyway - that's where the ink ran out.

I beat the Water Temple on my second try with those pages spread out on the carpet next to me. Turns out I'd missed a key under a floating platform. Everyone missed that key. That's exactly why Marshmallow and DarkMaster64 and all the others sat down at their keyboards and typed it out, one plain-text line at a time, for free, for strangers.

Nobody writes 200-page plain-text walkthroughs anymore. You get stuck now, you pull up a three-minute YouTube video. It's faster. It's probably better. But I don't think anyone's ever printed out a YouTube video and kept it in a box in their parents' garage for twenty-five years. Some things only meant something because they were inconvenient.