Once upon a time, video games used to come complete with an instruction manual, and one of the great pleasures of buying a new game was that time spent in the car on the way back from the shop, leafing through said manual to scrub up on things prior to booting up the actual product when you got home.
Today, the humble instruction manual is all but a thing of the past; sure, some modern games still come with them, but the vast majority of physical games don't – and I feel like we've lost something in the process.
Still, I'm not so much of a hopeless nostalgia junkie to deny that not all manuals were created equal; Japanese games used to come with gorgeous full-colour manuals packed with artwork (even if the text was unreadable to me), while games released in Europe and other PAL regions were cursed with instructions that came in multiple languages, meaning that space for artwork was at a premium (I also hated that many European manuals were printed in black and white).
The fact that Euro instructions had to be translated into several languages is pertinent to this news story, as a YouTuber by the name of Goblin Retro is on a quest to find out which is the heaviest manual released for the Sony PlayStation (thanks, Sonic Yoda).
While Japanese and North American PS1 manuals were rather slim in comparison, European instruction books were often so thick they took up most of the case, thanks to the fact that you weren't just getting the English text, but German, French, Dutch and more.
Goblin Retro has been collecting various PS1 titles and weighing their manuals, even going so far as to maintain a leaderboard of the ones that come with the heaviest examples. At the time of writing, the current champ is NBA Live 97, whose manual tips the scales at a whopping 141 grams.
While I wouldn't suggest in this case that the size and weight of this particular manual have any impact on its quality, I still find it amusing that someone, somewhere, is documenting all of this for posterity. Goblin Retro, we salute you.