Nintendo Power Magazine

Nintendo Power is Nintendo of America's house magazine. They began publishing this magazine in August of 1988. It replaced the free Nintendo Fun Club newsletters; those who received the newsletters got a complementary issue of Nintendo Power. A subsciption then cost $15 for 6 issues a year, then changed to $18 for 12 issues a year; the price went up again when my subscription ran out in 1994. Cover price was $3.50; today, I think it is higher. Because of that price, and many freebies in promotions, as you will soon read, most opted to subscribe.

Nintendo Power is a magazine aimed toward younger gamers, about 7 to 12. I subscribed until I was about 16, because, despite its somewhat juvenile approach to gaming, because it offers a wealth of useful information on Nintendo games, such as game secrets, passwords, hits to beating enemies, and so on. It also had entire in-depth game reviews and maps for the most popular games.

The magazine was It was published under the direction of Howard Phillips, Nintendo of America's official spokesman until 1991 (?). He often appeared in the magazine, in his trademark bow tie. Howard even appeared in a comic strip with a character named Nester (Nester, NES-ter. Get it?). After Howard Phillips departure, the magazine went downhill. A year or so later, they completely changed the layout of the magazine, and went to a system color-coded scheme for their game related articles. The new layout was horrendous, and gave the mag a somewhat sterile look, which is, of course, completely wrong for a mag aimed at younger gamers.

An interesting fact about Nintendo Power, is that it had no outside advertising until 1994. The mag only had ads for Nintendo products, and, of course, an ad to subscribe or renew to the magazine (almost always in the inside of the front cover and first page). I assume rising publishing costs forced them to accept outside advertising; Nintendo asked readers if outside ads were okay versus a slight increase in price in one of their polls.

The news about upcoming games and hardware in Nintendo Power was exactly what Nintendo wanted you to hear, or rather, what they though would be prudent to tell the "kiddies". Much of the information Nintendo gave out to the gaming press, never made it to Nintendo Power until much later that the other mags. The producers of NP said that it was because of the lag time between announcement and finalization of the magazine for production. That is a lame excuse. EGM scooped Nintendo Power ALL THE TIME, with Nintendo's own stuff! I guess they put a low priority on informating gamers of upcoming events, or only wanted to report those things they were really sure about, before the kids got too excited and upset them if changes were made. Probably both.

Nintendo Power has lots of different regular features. Among them are Counselor's Corner, where NP Game Counselors ask frequently asked questions for popular games, Classified Information, where people write in and give codes and cheats for games, and Pak Watch, which previewed up and coming games. They also ran a contest every month, with a wide variey of prizes. You could enter the contest by filling out a card in the back of each magazine, and answering a few questions, such as, "What are your top five favorite games?", or "What is Mario's partner's name?". Frankly, I think NP could have put more information (i.e. make these sections larger) in Counselor's Corner and Classified Information. The magazine, of course, has game reviews for popular games; this was Nintendo Power's strongest point. These reviews contained maps, strategy, hidden stuff, and so much more. They usually took a player right to just before the end of a game, so, as they have said, not to ruin the ending for you; sometimes, this really sucked, since the hardest parts of a game are usually at the end.

Of special note is the letters section. NP filled this section with mostly mindless drivel from the "kiddies". Don't misunderstand me, I have no problem with kids writing in saying how much they love Super Mario Brothers and sending in Zelda rap songs and stuff, but to fill an ENTIRE letters scetion with that kind of stuff? In the time I subscribed to the magazine, there were only a few, serious letters printed, which ask pertainent, relevant questions regarding Nintendo and video games. A majority of these letters were concerning the controversy over Nintendo's censorship of licensed games. Also, NP never printed a serious letter of critcism of Nintendo or their products; only an occasional 15 word letter, saying something like "Why does the GameBoy have a back and white screen? We want a color GameBoy!". These are, of course, easy for the editor to reply to and dismiss. They used to also devote half of one of the two letters pages to a "Power Player", some guy who either thought he was cool, or someone wrote in talking about some guy they know that they think is so cool, because he beat X number of games and got scores X high. Whee. Luckily, they discontinued this after a while. It is cool if you are good at Nintendo and all, but most of these guys were on the dorky side. :)

One other feature in the mag was their contests. They were usually pretty cool; grand prizes were usually trips of some sort, or a very expensive prize. They gave away everything from RoboCop's car, to trips to Disneyworld, to a library of games, to a private screening for 25 friends to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie. Second prize was usually a Game Pak and something else, often a VHS tape of a movie if the contest was based on it. Third prize was a lame-ass Nintendo Power Jersey or T-shirt or some clothing with "Nintendo Power" on it.

Other stuff they put in Nintendo Powr included interviews with programmers and others in the biz, reports from the electronics trade shows, and other "player interest" articles. One of most pathetic, for many reasons, was a blow-by-blow account of a Nintendo Power Pad Party. The article was really just an ad for Nintendo's laughably bad NES accessory, the Power Pad. It went through how the boys and girls were divided up into two teams, all the games they played, World Class Track meet and such, and how everyone did. If this was supposed to get the kids to run out and buy the Power Pad and games, I doubt it worked. It just illustrated how dorky the device was, and how dorky one looks using it! One good article written, was about the then upcoming Super Mario Brothers 3. It was nice, because it gave the readed some background on how games are designed, and offered a chance to hear from the actual designers themselves. It would have been nice to see more articles like this, and less page-filler.

Nintendo Power has a bizarre sense of humor. I remember an ad at the beginning of one issue, with a picture of an old lunch lady in a hairnet, carrying four pounds of cafeteria meatloaf. The caption read, "It would be easier to eat four pounds of cafeteria meatloaf than beat someone who reads Nintendo Power!". Whatever. :)

Over the years, Nintendo had lots of different promotions for the magazine. Most memorable, is their offer when, you subscribe to Nintendo Power for one year, you get four free Player's Guides. These were four glossy, magazine sized, paperback books, with about 120 pages each. They were somewhat cheaply constructed, but contained lots of good information. One was called NES Atlas, containing game maps for NES game, GameBoy, with information on GameBoy games, Super NES, with, hey!, information on SNES games, and finally Mario, with information on Mario's creation, and maps for Super Mario World (for SNES). It was quite a sweet offer! Even though these books (and the mags for that matter) left some to be desired, for $19.95, it was still a great deal. Nintendo must have taken a bath on this offer, though, as it was never repeated again! Nintendo did continue the Player's Guide series, and they later offered one Player's Guide free, with a subscription to NP. I have one, called Top Scret passwords, which has lots of codes for Nintendo games. Another notable promotion, was Nintendo giving away a free copy of Dragon Warrior with a NP subscription. Quite a generous offer! I guess Nintendo had a surplus, since they released the first Dragon Warrior. I believed they kicked in a free guide of some kind to DW, too.

What has to be the lamest promotion of all, had to have been the Super Power Club trading cards. These cheap, flimsy, punch-out cards came in issues of Nintendo Power from Late 1993 to sometime in 1994. Each card featured a NES, GB, or SNES game. On front was an illustartion, sometimes just enlarged box or manual cover art. On the back was a short description of the game, and a "challenge", which consisted of three things you could try to see how good you are at that game; they range from Beginner, to Intermediate, to Pro. These challenges were usually pretty lame, not necessarily easy, but still lame. The cards were initially part of a contest, where, if you could collect a set of three different cards, which changed each moth, you won a game of your choice. You could even order a complete set for $5.00, which were specially marked so you couldn't use them for the contest. When the contest was officially over, Nintendo decided to continue the series of cards, because they were popular.

As a side note, Nintendo had, for the longest time, a free game hint line (Game Counselors line, as it was called). For just the price of long distance to Redmond, Washington, you could call up and ask the Game Counselor anything about any game! They were incredibly knowledgable, much to my surprise! I mean, these guys know games! Unfortunately, they replaced this free service with a 900 number in 1995. This line was heavily advertised in Nintendo Power.

If you are thinking about a video game magazine, Nintendo Power isn't too bad. If you can get past the sometimes overwhelming juvenile themes, there is a lot of good data in those mags. I still have my old Nintendo Power mags, even though I no longer subscribe. I now read EGM instead, because personally, I wanted a magazine about the entire video game scene, not just Nintendo. But, if you are dedicated to Nintendo game systems, NP should offer enough game information to make you happy.

Source: Nintendo Power Magazine (of course)
 

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