A little over a month ago I was farting around on Archive.org when I stumbled upon something magical. In the magazine rack section some amazing soul had uploaded over 100 issues of the now defunct Nintendo Power magazine. I was so excited about this I started sharing the link to the collection on twitter and facebook, and then next thing I knew everyone and their brother was also sharing the link. Sadly it looks like all this attention potentially drew the ire of Nintendo, and all of the issues seem to have been removed from the site which is a real bummer. Luckily I managed to snag a bunch of these and I’ve been able to dive back into the pages of one of my all time favorite magazines. As a quick aside, even though it shouldn’t, it endlessly amazes me how news is reported inaccurately online. Two days after I shared the link to the Nintendo Power archive and I started seeing sites report on it, about 75% of them assumed that either a) Nintendo uploaded them, or b) that the “internet archive” uploaded them. First of all, do people not know how the Internet Archive works? Second, hell no, Nintendo did not upload them, and three seconds of fact checking at the destination link would have shown them that. I think a bunch of these articles were just “me too” pieces that basically plagiarized whatever larger/loud source got it wrong first and no one bothers to fact check or do any research. I often wonder when something like this hits, do people even care about the actual news, or are they just interested in sharing it for likes, follows and clicks? Sigh.
Back to the magazine, I’m not sure where I stumbled on the first issue as a kid, but I vividly remember starting my collection with that very distinctive issue with the rad claymation cover back in 1988…
Like most kids my age I was addicted to the Nintendo Entertainment System and spent endless and afternoons and weekends perfecting my skills in games like the Super Mario Bros. trilogy, Bad Dudes, Section Z, Excite Bike and Final Fantasy. I used to pour over the pages of this magazine looking for tips, tricks and codes that would help me find my way to the negative world or get a hundred lives in Super Mario Bros., how to perfect the Konami Code, or how to navigate the murky world of Final Fantasy (via the amazing Strategy Guide in issue 17.) At some point I lost my sizeable collection of the magazine (I’d bet that my parents chucked them in one of our moves), and I haven’t dug into an issue since at least 1994. Flipping through these digital issues has been a blast and I absolutely love how “of the time” the graphic design is in all the ads and articles. I mean just take a gander at these two amazing slices of late 80s fun…
I kind of want to live in that surfing advertisement. Then there’s this third ad that details all of the Nintendo branded food products that were available back in the late 80s. I totally ate my weight in the official Nintendo cereal from Ralston, well, at leas the Zelda side of the box. I wasn’t much of a fan of the Mario Bros. cereal…
I totally do not remember the Nintendo juice boxes at all, but I vaguely remember some ice-cream novelties and those candy bars seem very familiar.
Scanning back through these I was a little surprised how formulaic the first 40 or so issues were. Each one featured a bunch of the same regular columns in the same layout from issue to issue. That’s not really a complaint mind you, just an observation, something I noticed when I realized that almost all of the first 42 issues featured a celebrity profile of an NES addicted superstar. All sorts of folks were featured in the pages of Nintendo Power, from actors and comedians like Fred Savage and Jay Leno, to sports stars and commercial icons like Ken Griffey Jr. and Joe Isuzu (of all people.) I thought it’d be fun to share a bunch of my favorite celebrity profiles from the first few years of the magazine. Though a bunch of these are from the ’88 & ’89 issues, there are also a handful from the ’90 to ’92 issues as well. I typically don’t dip much into the 90s here at Branded, but I thought for the sake of completeness that it would be worth it to make an exception this one time. So here are 20 of my favorite profiles…
I might as well start with the first issue from August of 1988 which featured a joint profile of those crazy Cameron kids, Kirk and Candace (from Growing Pains and Full House respectively.) Since I’m starting with Growing Pains I figured I might as well as throw in the Jeremy Miller profile from issue 23, April of 1991. While Candace had mastered Super Mario Bros. and was (at the time) totally stuck in the middle of the Legend of Zelda, Kirk was more of a Gradius man who was having such a hard time with the Amoeboids he was seriously considering placing a call to the legendary game counselors. Jeremy on the other hand was a huge fan of Star Tropics and Tetris and was really proud of hitting 289,000 in the infamous block clearing game.
The idea that Jay Leno was not only playing the Legend of Zelda, but that he was invested in it enough to call the Nintendo counselors asking for help on level 7 just makes me feel all kinds of warm and fuzzy. I know that celebrities are people too and the NES was huge when it hit, but I still can’t help but break out with a smile when I think of adult celebs getting video game thumb on the same games that I was playing as a kid. Also, I wonder how Leno liked Ikari Warriors? ‘Cause I loved it…
Speaking of adult celebs playing and loving the NES, this one from issue 10, Jan/Feb 1990 with Stephen Furst is probably my favorite profile of a “grown-up” by far. I love that he went so far as to submit a review of Double Dragon II (he loves that cyclone spin kick!) I also find it fascinating that Nintendo reached out to an actor like Furst. I mean, though some 80s kids were probably hip to Animal House, how many of them were watching St. Elsewhere?!
So, the above two profiles make way more sense to me in terms of the actors they were targeting. Fred Savage and David Faustino were the perfect age at the time for Nintendo’s main target audience, not to mention that Savage was in The Wizard. The Fred Savage profile is from issue 9, November/December 1989, while the Faustino profile appeared in issue 37 from 1992.
These celebrity profiles weren’t just for actual actors or sports heroes, it was also for characters too. Take these two that feature Bart Simpson and Freddy Kruger (well, Robert Englund, though from reading it, it’s clear he did the piece as Freddy) from issues 28 and 30 respectively. Though neither really talks about Nintendo per-se, I love the Power Glove jokes Englund delivers. Also, years before there was ever a Freddy Vs. Jason movie, Englund talks about the concept in his profile…
I could go on and on about these profiles, but I think I should just let them speak for themselves…
