What is the EarthBound Player's Guide?

Every American copy of EarthBound shipped with the EarthBound Player's Guide, a 128-page Nintendo guide written and designed as a travel book for the game's fictional country of Eagleland. It presents towns as destinations, quotes local newspapers, and illustrates everything with the series' signature clay figure photography, the models made for the Japanese official guidebook, recast for an American road trip.

The guide was the game's manual as well as its companion; the oversized box exists because this book had to fit inside it. Its completeness standard is therefore simple: a guide with its scratch-and-sniff cards intact and un-scratched is the complete article, and the cards are the first casualty in most surviving copies.

Nintendo returned to the book when the game finally came back: the Wii U Virtual Console release of July 18, 2013 included a free digitized version of the Player's Guide, an acknowledgment that the guide is half the product.

As print, it belongs to a brief American experiment: the lavish pack-in guide. EarthBound is its most famous example, and the only one whose failure in shops turned its own manual into a collectible.