An effort led by SNES Twitch streamer Peebs has created a complete online library of the console’s English language manuals.
In a project which has taken several years to complete, the content creator used various social media platforms to encourage SNES manual owners to create high-quality scans of their collections. Kotaku helped promote the effort and within the last two years, the library’s English language collection went from 52% to 100% completion.
The project began soon after Peebs started completing every single SNES game. These older games often require information from the manuals in order to properly explain the game’s mechanics. This led him to realize that there isn’t a good resource for reading the manuals available. He began to create the collection himself, asking his followers to scan and upload high-quality images of any manuals they owned.
The last game manual collected was 90 Minutes: European Prime Goal, a 1995 soccer game featuring European national teams. Peebs has not only been collecting English language manuals, he has all the manuals for the unique PAL releases and he is also now close to completing the library for all SNES games released in the West.
The archive currently holds hundreds of game manuals. While Peebs has not expressed a desire to collect all of the manuals released in Japan, if he includes these releases in the project it would more than double the collection.
Celebrating the achievement in tweets, Peebs thanked the community for their efforts. “I never thought we’d finish the SNES Manual project or I thought it would take me well over a decade if we did,” he said. “All of you are fantastic and you inspire me to continue doing what I’m doing. Thank you for supporting me this entire time!”
If you are a fan of the SNES, then check out our list of the 10 best SNES games of all time, and see which games you should add to your backlog.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.