Where does the art you only see in a guide come from?
Open an old guide and you will meet art that exists nowhere in the game it documents: character paintings in poses the game never uses, concept pieces, clay figures, invented newspapers. None of it is accidental. Guide art came from two distinct sources, and telling them apart explains most of what is on the page: art the game's maker handed to the guide maker under license, sometimes before the public had ever seen it, and art the guide maker created itself because the license, or the lack of one, required it.
Source one: the licensor's own files
Access was part of the dealDoug Walsh's account of guide work describes the pipeline plainly: a guide team spent its first days deciding which assets to request from the licensor, maps, art, and data among them, and usually received access to the game plus character and item art. Piggyback's Louie Beattie says the same from the publisher's side: everything is vetted by the licensing partner, and we get certain artworks exclusively. Prima's Nintendo partnership guides, from Super Mario Galaxy to Super Mario Odyssey, are recorded as containing gameplay help alongside canon lore and sometimes never before seen concept art. A guide could be the first publication a piece of official art ever appeared in, which is why collectors treat some guides as art books that happen to contain a walkthrough.
Source two: art the guide made itself
The unauthorized books had to draw their ownGameSpot's 1997 three way comparison makes the divide visible. BradyGames' official FFVII guide had plenty of Square artwork throughout. The two unauthorized rivals had no Square artwork at all, only screens from the game, and Versus Books answered with unofficial artwork of its own plus a poster. EarthBound's Player's Guide is the beloved extreme of guide made art: a retrospective account describes figurines photographed to show the enemies and characters, fake advertisements for the towns' stores, a newspaper for each location introducing its events, photographs of real places presented as the game's towns, and scratch and sniff cards bound into the back. Almost none of that was in the game. It was invented to make a book feel like the world it documented, a travel guide for a country that does not exist. The Library's EarthBound page tells how that guide came to be packed inside the game's oversized American box.
The sharpest case in this Library
Art bundled with the game itselfThe Castlevania shelf holds the period's neatest inversion. The Japanese PlayStation release of Symphony of the Night was packaged with a small art book of Ayami Kojima's work and a short prelude manga, plus a soundtrack CD, while American buyers received no equivalent, as the Library's Castlevania guide page documents. In that case the guide only art was not in a guide at all. Japan bundled the art with the game, and America sold the help separately. Covers in this gallery are shown for identification only; the interiors discussed here are described, not scanned, because the art's first home was a printed book and its story can be told without reproducing it.