The market offers all kinds of reproductions for Super Nintendo cartridges and shells, power supplies, mods, and parts for repair. Yet some elements don't usually survive, and among them are the manuals or booklets that came with each game. Twitch streamer Peebs spent eight years finishing every English-language title for the console, and he and other enthusiasts decided to collect and preserve Super Nintendo game manuals in digital format.
The first thing to die is the box: people hate storing boxes of everything they buy for many reasons, from space issues to the family cat that uses it as a bathroom. And the manuals usually die with them, printed on basic paper with minimal durability. Fast forward a decade or two, and both boxes and manuals become collector's items, especially when we're talking about computers and consoles.
With that in mind, we come to the Super Nintendo. The console has more than thirty years on its shoulders, but it isn't hard to get spare parts or reproductions. You can even find cartridge labels in high quality to restore their look, but if you're thinking about downloading and reproducing a manual, every arrow points to the work Peebs has done, who published more than 800 Super Nintendo manuals on the Internet Archive.
The Super Nintendo game manuals on the Internet Archive
Peebs explains that much of the work had already been done by user K1rkl4nd, who shared copies of the manuals for the 724 Super Nintendo games on the US market, but Peebs's scans aim to take an extra step by including games from PAL regions. The available information suggests the Super Nintendo had a total of 1,757 official games worldwide. Peebs's collection reaches 861 PDFs, combining NTSC and PAL.
Obviously, exploring these manuals you find art for every taste: fantastic, horrible, and strange from every angle. For example, the Chrono Trigger manual screams "Toriyama!" on almost every page, but if you switch to something like Phalanx, you find the famous old man with the banjo... in a science fiction game.
As for the quality of the scans, in general we can say that K1rkl4nd's uploads have superior resolution, but page alignment often fails in many cases, while Peebs's manuals are "whole" (meaning they weren't taken apart for scanning), but their final resolution is lower. If you need a manual, don't hesitate to download and compare!
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