Geekscape’s Love Letters To Nintendo Power

With the news earlier this week that Nintendo Power magazine will be ceasing publication as of December it was yet another sign that print is dying. For years Nintendo Power was one of the only ways to get the inside scope on the latest news about our favorite games. It helped shape and change the lives of geeks everywhere, especially around here at Geekscape. With that said, some of the staff wanted to share some of their memories regarding Nintendo Power. These are their love letters, enjoy.

Ben Dunn

I read Nintendo Power as a kid, not because I needed updates about the games that I would be enjoying soon, or tips on games that I was playing now, but because it was the closest my parents let me get to video games. Yes, I wasn’t allowed to have video games in the house until I was 15. Before that I could only play NES, Super NES or Gameboy  when I went to friends houses. In fact, the only reason I got my first girlfriend was because I was always over at her house playing her NES and I helped her beat Mega Man 3. (With the tips I learned from reading Nintendo Power.) So even though my parents wouldn’t let me have them in the house, they did let me read about all of the great games I was missing.

I think my favorite part was the envelope fan art submissions. I must have drawn the Triforce on at least 15 different envelopes trying to get in there. Never did though. I think it was because I never actually included anything in the envelopes when I sent them and the postal office had them destroyed along with all my letters to Hanukkah Harry. While I haven’t read NP in years, I still have my player card somewhere in a trunk and will never forget the hole it filled in my video game free childhood. RIP Nintendo Power. May flights of winged koopas sing thee to thy rest!

Shane O’Hare

The moment I heard Nintendo Power was going to stop, my heart sank. I felt like a great childhood friend was going away for good. I remember discovering Nintendo Power for the very first time. It is one of my oldest and fondest memories.

It was the Christmas of the Nintendo 64. I had it up and open and I was bummed that I had to wait until tomorrow because we didn’t have the RF adapter. Another gift of mine was the Super Mario 64 soundtrack and inside that was an ad to get a 12 month subscription to the magazine. My dad saw it and said “Hmmm this looks cool! You get cheat codes and stuff, Ill mail this out tomorrow for you”.

The next month I had my very first issue. I will never forget the cover. It was Star Wars: Shadows of The Empire and that issue was the reason I bought that game. Since then my childhood all the way up until Junior year in high school was filled with Nintendo Power. I couldn’t wait to see what the next month’s cover was. what the fold out poster was and what were the next games we could expect in the coming months. No other magazine could keep my attention like this. Subs to Popular Science and various car magazines have come and gone, but my good ole’ Nintendo Power stuck by. Any time during middle school, if you walked into my bathroom the floor was covered with back issues, all very well read.

Nintendo Power introduced me to Pokemon, Jetforce Gemini, Forsaken 64, Goldeneye and Turok. My parents played a great prank on me when Super Smash Bros suddenly “showed up” in the mail, only because they had heard me talking all about this amazing next level game while reading about it in Nintendo Power. I would bring my issues to school and be the badass of the playground.

Let me put it this way: I discovered my favorite creators (Mega 64) because Nintendo Power ran a blurb about their Tetris video in an issue. And those guys have been a huge influence on my life. Hearing the news that Nintendo Power is going away made me very sad. I am going to renew my subscription as a last goodbye and that final issue will be framed.

Josh Jackson

 I have two major memories of Nintendo Power growing up, and despite my love for the magazine for so many childhood years, neither of them are good.

The first was introducing me to Earthbound, which was far from bad in and of itself. It was the way they did it.

The magazine had a set of scratch and sniff stickers with the brilliant tag line of, “This Game Stinks!” Needless to say, they weren’t kidding. Those damn things all smelled god awful! Hey Nintendo, that’s a great way to sell a game. Let’s have a sticker with Ness on it that smells like flaming charcoal ass farts. How did that work out again?

The second was Star Fox. Not the space badass that saves the Lylat system from the mad scientist, Andross. No… I mean this guy…

Yes, this Fox. You know, this scary asshole. The one who looks like he’s going to rip your throat out in your sleep. The one who literally had his legs chopped off and replaced with robotic implants. Yeah… That Fox.

So yeah, thank you Nintendo Power. Thank you for giving me nightmares and almost burning out my fucking nostrils.

But seriously, it was a great run filled with many other great memories of running down to the mailbox every month to get the latest news on my favorite Nintendo games and instantly become the coolest kid on my block. If it wasn’t for that, I might not be writing here for Geekscape today.

So cheers Nintendo Power. Thanks for the memories. No matter how messed up they are.

Jonathan London

Gaming news sites these past few days have been lamenting the news that Nintendo Power will end publication this December, but how many of them have voiced responsibility for these turn of events? Let’s face it. With the proliferation of the internet and geek culture news sites such as our own, the need for print publications like Wizard, Electronic Gaming Monthly and now Nintendo Power has gradually (and then steeply) declined. We can voice our sadness, but how many of us still subscribed to any of these publications? Not many of us.

Which really is the irony, since Nintendo Power was the first magazine that I ever had a subscription to. In many ways, those issues from the mid to late 80s inspired the sharing of enthusiasm, knowledge and opinion that you’re experiencing right here at Geekscape. I remember seeing the claymation cover announcing Super Mario Bros. 3 and losing my 11 year old mind. What about the fully realized drawings of game characters like Link and Samus that filled in the gaps left by trying to fully realize something you’d only seen in 8 bits? For me, the highlight was always the multipage game maps that would unfold in each issue, a precursor to the internet’s Walkthrough guides, that showed you were the different platforms and traps were or how to navigate Hyrule in the first Zelda. My friends and I all had that map cut out of Nintendo Power and taped up on our walls or folded in our school folders. The map to Tim Burton’s Batman game saved my life many times, as did the one for the Roger Rabbit and Dick Tracy games.

The one I’ll always remember was the 2D fold out map for some of the stages from Super Mario Bros. 2. As if the game wasn’t already enough of a stylistic departure from the first one, you could now play as different characters with different abilities. Hearing about the end of Nintendo Power this week jarred a memory that I’d forgotten for decades: I created a different Super Mario Bros. sequel (or spin off game) and designed the entire thing on taped together pieces of construction paper designed to imitate one of those Nintendo Power fold out maps. The game was centered around Toad, Princess Peach’s mushroom capped retainer, and was called Toad’s Maze. In reality, it was basically the second Goonies game but with Toad as your main character. You fought bats, collected items, jumped platforms and went through different doors in order to escape a giant cavernous maze. I now realize that calling a game Toad’s Maze, and then having you play as the character of Toad lost in his very own damn maze is pretty stupid. Toad would have to be a complete idiot to get lost in his own maze or even set foot in a maze which he owns that is littered with a zillion death traps.

Come to think of it, the game probably wasn’t that great, but it was an extensive piece of work, probably as lengthy as the fold out maps from each issue of Nintendo Power. I was 10 years old and I had designed my own game. That’s pretty amazing looking back. As listeners of the podcast know, I’m a Nintendo fanboy to this day and have been my entire life. I even competed in the Nintendo Championships back in 1991. But with games at $50 a pop, the 10 year old me had to either borrow friend’s games or make them up himself. For all of my game cravings in-between, there was Nintendo Power magazine.