Adventure Gamers - Forums
You are here: Home → Forum Home → Gaming → Adventure → Thread
Post Marker Legend:
-
New posts -
No new posts
Currently online
Hintbook Sales
How well did hintbooks sell? How many sold poorly due to their games being too easy? How much of a correlation is there between hintbook sales and game difficulty, or were there a significant number of players that bought hintbooks even after beating a game?
Well, one legendary tale of hint books is Leisure Suit Larry 1. Sierra initially thought the game was a failure, as it didn’t sell that well at all, but suddenly they noticed they were selling a lot of hint books for it.
I’ve heard about that (or at least read it). I wonder if that happened with very many other games. Some games seem to have the reputation of being considered easy like Eric the Unready or Gateway (did Infocom release hintbooks/invisiclues for introductory games?), but if they sold a lot of hintbooks, that would imply the games weren’t easy enough for a lot of people unless they bought them for collecting, curiosity, or some other reason.
In addition to LSL1, Sierra sold hint books for most of their early games. I think I bought one for Codename Iceman. Since most early games had some ludicrously difficult puzzles that had to be completed in very precise fashion, and failure to do so resulted in death, hint books were a necessity.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
You are here: Home → Forum Home → Gaming → Adventure → Thread
