Thread by @xuenay

So who else wrote instruction manuals for imaginary video games as a kid?

E.g. the instruction manual for an imaginary platformer had a long list of levels with their descriptions, together with a list and pictures of every power-up etc.

I had at least one series called "and Fly", where you played some bug. Started with, I think, "Plant and Fly", in which you were in a garden/forest, followed by the sequel "Home and Fly" in which you were in someone's home.

I _think_ the bug in "and Fly" was a crashed alien and had to reassemble the components for its flying saucer, but not sure. At least in the first game. Dunno what it was doing in the second one.

The "Dimension Machine" series was based on something we used to play with my friend Eero. The swings in our courtyard were the titular machine, used to travel between dimensions.

Food Dimension (where everything was made out of food), In-Between-Dimension (that you had to travel through to get to any other dimension), Game Dimension (filled with all the characters from _real_ video games), Monster Dimension (the normal HQ of the bad guys), etc.

The pretense was that each time we played this, it was one movie, being produced by The Producer. Before not too long, The Producer was kidnapped and replaced by the impersonator, The Fake Producer. He and his children became the recurring villain.

And then when I imagined the video games made from the Dimension Machine series, The Producer and The Fake Producer were obviously recurring characters there as well.

The Dimension Machine series spanned game genres. There was a platformer, a Gradius-style shoot'em'up, a SimDimension game which had you building your own dimension, a real-time strategy, and so on. Each with its own instruction manual, of course.

Most of these were for the imaginary game console "Captain Help", a name which I picked after I found out that Nintendo had a character called "Captain N". Also the name of my imaginary megacorporation that did everything (including consoles) was "Kaj's Help INC".

So then I would also write issues of the "Captain Help News" magazine, loosely powered after the content in the local Nintendo Magazine. IIRC had game reviews of imaginary games, news items, explaining new consoles and accessories, etc.

There were also some games where the first level was near my (and Eero's) home and then you went through basically all the places around our home and town, and traveled to random foreign places like Japan etc. after that?

I think the genre varied within those games, so mostly had platformer levels but also some driving levels on streets, etc.

Oddly enough I can't recall any Sotala Force games/manuals. SF was the galaxy-wide army loosely fashioned after a combination of Star Wars and Star Trek. Me and Eero (and also Aleksi IIRC) were the top leaders/Jedi masters/elite commandos.

I'm not sure where any of those manuals / magazines are anymore. :( But possibly they'll turn up at some point.

Later we tried our hand at making actual games too, but unsurprisingly just writing manuals for games was a lot faster than making full games.