I only discovered recently that the company that created Prima guides (who later amalgamated with the similar Brady guides) had ceased production over a year ago. It was only by chance I discovered this after a friend requested one of my spare strategy guides that I'd had in my Steam inventory of over a decade. He told me after redeeming the Steam key, that he wasn't able to access the guide. We then found out that Steam had never stored the strategy guides on their servers like they do with any game you buy from Valve. So, when Prima/Brady ceased, they closed their servers so access to those guides was no longer possible.
Initially I was a little peeved because I'd purchased quite a few of the digital guides on Steam before they stopped selling them several years ago and had always expected to be able to access them.
It was only a few days later when we were discussing the issue that I reckoned some bright spark would copy their hard copies and upload them for the gaming community eventually; so, I went to my go to search engine (Google of course) and did a quick search. I found a site I was familiar with immediately i.e. The Internet Archive and discovered the archive had at least 500 strategy guides readily available for download totally for free, that included original digital copies of Prima and Brady guides as well as others such as IGN guides and others, some in black & white, others in full colour, scanned copies of book versions and even a few fan made ones that were typed out with no images, tables or maps.
There's also a whole range of guides from classic games like the Ultima and Dungeons & Dragons franchises to big name AAA games like Assassins Creed, Bioshock, Battlefield, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy etc.
You can find the Strategy guides HERE
You'll find some filters along the top of the strategy guide i.e., VIEWS, TITLE, DATE PUBLISHED and CREATOR, (see the third image above). The guides are arranged as a grid of thumbnail images of the strategy guides front covers. Clicking on one will take you to page (see the first image above) that lists the different formats that you can download the strategy guides in; for example, PDF (my go to format), ePUB, Full Text, Kindle and others. Click on your download option then wait for it to load; depending on how large the download is, you will be ready to download the strategy guide you want from within a few seconds to about a minute.
The page may need to reload several times for each of the filters. I later discovered that running the same filter would include previously unseen strategy guides; so, if you don't find the ones you're looking for, try again. Of course, there's also a search field if you know the exact or approximate name of the strategy guide. I've gone through particular filters several times and still keep finding guides that I have the games for. So far, I've downloaded over 480 guides for games I own on Steam and elsewhere. I'm hoping it will inspire me to dig out some of those games and replay them as I know that most games that I've purchased over the last fifteen years I've never completed simply because I have too many to choose from.
Before I went digital, I used to buy a couple of games at a time from my local Game store, which was about 10 miles away from home or one that was 10–15-minute walk from where I worked in the city centre of Manchester. I wouldn't buy another until I had completed both games. The last few hard copy games I completed totally were the original Call of Duty 1 and 2, Men of Honour plus the expansions (as part of the War Box edition) and Line of Sight: Vietnam. I have also completed or near completed some digital games, such as Dying Light, Left Dead 1 & 2 and both Dead Island games, though with games like Left 4 Dead there are hundreds of custom-made maps and other modifications and I've still to play a lot of the maps created by the community. Unfortunatey, I need a 60-hour day and a ten-day week to even get near playing all the games I want to play at any one time. There's just not enough time in a day to be able to play everything and the number of games being released virtually every day is overwhelming these days. You should see my Steam wish list; it has several thousand games added.
Before I thought to check online for possible digital uploads, I went to eBay, assuming (correctly), that as Prima Strategy guides were no longer being published. They would as time passed become harder to find on places like eBay.
There were a couple of guides I had been after for a while i.e., Fallout 76 Vault Dwellers Survival Guide Collector's edition and a similar Fallout 4 strategy guide, both of which I managed to win and were in virtually mint condition. for around £20 each plus postage. I prefer to buy hard back editions and found quite a few ranging in price from around £10 to £150 (though all of the cheapest ones were from American and postal charges were always around £30 from America to the Uk where I live. The price mainly depending on the state of the guide and whether it was soft backed, standard or collectors' editions. Over time these prices are likely to rise as volumes become rarer to find.
I personally prefer hard copies as for me there's nothing like having a nice solid book in my hands; however, for free it's well worth checking out the Internet Archive for those strategy guides you've always wanted, but never got around to buying. I will be revisiting a lot of my old games now that I've found the guides that I never considered buying when I first bought the games. :)
