Strange detail of the Mega Drive: why did they make holes in the instructions?

Many people have probably noticed a strange thing: early Japanese releases for the Sega Mega Drive had instructions with neatly punched holes.A logical question arises: why was this necessary at all?

I did a little research.Beep21 magazine has an article about Sega's marketing decisions in the late 80s, and it explains it quite prosaically.

Initially, manuals were made with six holes - for standard ring binders, so that they could be stored as a collection.Essentially, Sega tried to turn the instructions into something like a personal archive: bought the game → added the manual to the binder → collected the library.

But it quickly became clear that this was not profitable:

• punching holes turned out to be an unexpectedly expensive operation; • the holes themselves “ate up” the useful area of ​​the page; • as a result, the text had to be spread over more pages, which further increased the cost.

As a result, this practice was abandoned after about six months - and subsequent editions were already published without holes.

At the same time, the logic of the solution itself fits well with the Japanese approach of that time: careful storage, systematization, collecting as part of the user experience.

I separately looked at the topic with folders - such binders were common then, and now there are plenty of them.Moreover, modern 6-hole punchers are very close in geometry to those used in SEG manuals.

In the comments I will leave a list of releases with “leaky” instructions. #game