Playing With Power
Playing With Power – Nintendo Fun Club News #7
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Now that turkey day is over, it’s time to look at the turkey of the Nintendo Fun Club News: Issue 7.
Issue 7 was the last issue of the newsletter before the launch of Nintendo Power and you can easily see the lower quality of the content of the magazine. The magazine is 4 pages shorter than all the previous issues and of the 26 pages that does not include the front or back cover, 12 pages are full page ads. For all those without your TI80 calculator handy, that is almost 1/2 of the magazine wasted on ads. Then of the pages that have actual content, the information is mostly high level tips that most players could find out on their own. You can easily see that Nintendo was fully invested in Nintendo Power and just needed to release this magazine to hold over the subscribers.
Let’s see how the Nintendo Fun Club News finished it’s run.
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- Turtle-Mania would have been just getting ramped up in America so seeing an ad for a TMNT game would be quite exciting
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- Look for master tips for Metroid….
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- Which is apparantly 2 screenshots and a description of Samus’ upgrades…oh boy.
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- An entire ad with no screenshots?
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- What a great game
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- Another ad, no screenshots. I guess they really assumed we would just buy anything that released back then.
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- Would this be the first delayed release for the NES?
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- As corny as this looks, this really is the way it felt to read Nintendo Power as a kid
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- For being ‘Pro Tips’, these are some pretty basic tips that players would have figured out themselves
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- One of the few times you will see any game above Zelda in these early years of the newsletter/magazine
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- The players give tips as good as the pros did
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- The last crossword puzzle in a Nintendo magazine….boooo….
So that is the end of Nintendo Fun Club News. For the time, it served its purpose of delivering news and information to the growing fans of the NES but with Nintendo-mania reaching hyper levels by this point Nintendo realized they needed more to meet the demands of the fans, it’s just sad to see it go out with such a whimper.
Next time, the premier of what could be argued as the greatest video game magazine of all time!
Play with power!
Chris Owens
Chris Owens enjoys gaming history and wants to share it with whoever will listen. You can follow him on Twitter @metalslime80 for daily NES gameplay videos and other retro game links that he finds interesting.
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