My friends and I had a stack of hand drawn maps of Metroid on graph paper that we traded back and forth. Not as convenient as sharing them on the internet, but somehow more gratifying.

Well, there were magazines. Nintendo Power started pretty late in the 80s, but it was also I think the first place I heard about the minus worlds.

Hey, I was the guy that submitted the trick to Nintendo Power! A friend of a friend showed it to me after school and I immediately mailed it in to the magazine. Nintendo Power Agent #826.

I heard about it before nintendo power existed.

Ok. To be clear, there were video game magazines before Nintendo Power (C&VG, for eg. Also, more obscure, but Nintendo's own predecessor the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter) and they played a significant role in spreading this info. The kid with the magazine sub was king of the playground, basically.

I was just stating my experience there.

I remember printing off hundreds of pages of video game cheat codes/walkthroughs on the internet at the local university's computer lab in 1995. That was the first time that I got free information from the internet that I would have otherwise had to pay for. Before that, the only place to look that stuff up was in magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly. Hell, Nintendo had a paid hotline for cheats.

I remember when one of my cousins was hospitalized, we gave him a Mortal Kombat move list Booklet as a "Get well soon" gift :D

Back in the day, figuring out all the moves in a fighting was a meta-game on its own.