Amusingly enough, I didn’t much care for Nintendo Power back when it launched in 1988. I wasn’t a big NES fanboy and I knew the mag was a house organ designed to pretend anything Nintendo was the best thing since sliced bread. Being system agnostic, I’ve always disliked this sort of thing when it’s that biased against other platforms, so it was quite easy to stick to my guns.  Sure, Nintendo was the company that pulled the game industry out from the grave back with the successful launch of the NES in 1985, then created the dedicated portable gaming market with the original Game Boy in 1989, but that didn’t mean they (or any other game company) could always ignore other platforms that had games of equal or better quality.

Despite Nintendo’s instant deity status among millions, initially, I wasn’t too impressed with the NES because I’d played Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Popeye, and a bunch of the other classic arcade ports to death (in actual arcades) and didn’t see the need to do so all over again, no matter how good the games were. Stubborn (and stupid), wasn’t I?  OK, maybe I was a tiny bit biased as well, as I somehow had little to no trouble playing some Sega Master System and later, Sega Genesis arcade ports. Ah well, nobody’s perfect, right? I  did come around to the joys of the NES and later, SNES once I got my paws on Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Wizardry, The Bard’s Tale and a bunch of other RPGs I wasn’t seeing on any Sega platform, but that took a few years longer than it should have…

I even had the chance to subscribe to Nintendo Power early on, but chose not to. Of course, seeing friends getting stuff like a free copy of Dragon Warrior (still one of the best giveaways ever, hands down), free strategy guides and other awesome goodies made me kick myself a few times. I did read the magazine from time to time and found it well-written and packed with info, but it wasn’t until about 1994 or ’95 that I finally subscribed, having picked up a new SNES and a bunch of games cheap from a store that was going out of business. I was pretty happy with the magazine, but with better mags such as Die Hard  Game Fan on the scene doing a bang-up job covering imports and my interest in Japanese games, I felt Nintendo wasn’t taking a better, smarter look at the potential of some truly outstanding imports as  a potential part of the US lineup.

I stuck with the mag for a few years into the N64 era and I think I ended up letting my subscription (as well as subs to some other game mags) lapse at some point in order to save money to buy more games. That and the house rags of the next console cycles,  Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine (OSDM), Official PlayStation Magazine (OPM) and Official Xbox Magazine (OXM) all offered something Nintendo never did in its mags: game demo discs on a monthly basis. Yes, there were a handful of standalone GameCube, Wii  and Nintendo DS demo discs released plus some not for sale kiosk demo discs that command high dollars on eBay these days. However, I’m gathering that Nintendo stayed out of the monthly demo disc business for financial reasons more than not wanting to show off what  assorted dev teams were hard at work on.

But that’s all in the past as we move into the future full steam ahead. I haven’t read an issue of NP in years and like the company itself, I thought the mag would always be around for those who wanted it. Sadly, the reality of the ongoing recession plus the fact that game info and assistance can be readily found online without waiting a month in front of the mailbox means that losing Nintendo Power as a physical product was only a matter of time. It will no doubt be missed by those who relied on it for tips and info as well as those who were a huge part of its years of success as a house organ. Me, I’ll raise a glass to the old days and yet another part of it joining the history books. Of course, who reads actual history books anymore?  We’ve “E-printed” so much text to the point that one can imagine an entire generation of people being left dumb and dumbstruck should the internet stop working for a few days. Thankfully actual libraries as places to visit and pore over history on paper in person will never be obsolete (I hope)…