Nintendo Power, maps and Japanese board games

[N-Man]

If I ever have the opportunity to talk about Nintendo with anyone, one of the first things I bring up to this day is Nintendo Power magazine. I freaking loved Nintendo Power, and that magazine is very much tied to my love of Nintendo games more generally. When I lost interest in NP, I lost interest in Nintendo – never completely, mind you, as I am a Switch owner and was previously a Wii owner, but my fondest video game memories are of the golden age of Nintendo Power magazine.
 
To be precise, I was a huge fan of the early era where Gail Tilden was editor-in-chief and where the magazine design was heavily inspired by Japanese sensibilities. I never really understood this at the time, but learned about it in this interview: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/n...e-magazine
 
At the time, NP was all about the maps. Each 'featured game' (as opposed to the previews or reviews) had full stage maps for at least several levels. This is a classic one from Zelda 2:



What the article above explains is that the maps were a suggestion from Minoru Arakawa, who took inspiration from existing Japanese magazines like Famitsu. They were supplemented by little blurbs about different areas in the game, as well as game art showing the characters, items, enemies, etc. This was so cool as it really gave you a feel for the game without fully spoiling it. In some cases, I think I enjoyed the maps more than the games themselves.
 
The very first issue has some great examples as well. I love that these have illustrations of things happening in the game, in the level that is shown on that very page:

 
        


They continued using this format heavily for several years, across different consoles and different genres. While it was of course excellent for 2D side-scrollers and top-down games, NP used it in many different declinations, including isometric games and racing games. It did get a bit silly in some cases, like for beat-em-ups that were basically completely linear and did not really involve any sort of navigation.
 



  
I always thought the design approach – the maps, the art, the layouts, the little info boxes – was really fantastic. Other parts of the magazine were excellent as well, including reader engagement pieces like polls and contest as well as the previews section, but the game features with their maps always felt like the heart of the magazine. NP moved away from this approach gradually in the mid-90s. Part of this was due to adopting an 'edgier' look to fit with the times, but it's also probably the case that 3D games were trickier to map out effectively (with 2D games, you could just take snapshots of the screen as you moved forward). Articles also generally became more text-heavy. It seems like, around this time, and even more so in the 2000s, video game writing became about opinions, which was never very appealing to me.
 
I have always wondered why this first incarnation of NP had such an impact on me. It's nostalgia, sure, but there are things that create a stronger sense of nostalgia than others. One of my assumptions has always been that, well, there was a change in 'tone' from the 1980s to the 1990s and I preferred the colourful and energetic design from the 80s to the dark, edgy trends of the 90s. I still think that is true, but reading that interview with Gail Tilden made me realize that Japanese aesthetic sensibilities of that era also had a strong impact on NP's early layouts and design.
 
While randomly browsing Ebay for classic board games, I landed on Bandai's range of Joy Family board games from the 80s and it struck me that, while obviously different from a magazine, there was something about their design intent that made them feel similar to (what I think is) NP's golden era. There is a guy called Nathan Altice who has made a career out of studying these games and tracing their history back to a type of ancient Japanese board game called sugoroku. You can read some of his work here: https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/1105 and see Altice's collection of Bandai board games here: https://analogjoy.club/
 
It is probably not a surprise that many of these board games are, in fact, based on video game licenses. I'm not entirely sure how to describe the aesthetic connection between Joy Family and Nintendo Power design, but I think it is about using art to breathe life into a map or other structured layout. In retrospect, many of the level maps in NP kind of feel like board games – you can imagine moving a little plastic figure across the screens, rolling dice to pass each challenge. There is also an aspect to them that seems unabashedly hand-made, which is appealing in this era of automatic everything. A few years ago, someone gave me a book called Rakugaki about the "Japanese art of scribbling". One of the taglines is that it is about "creating a large universe with small drawings". I think that is part of it too.
 
One of my favorite Bandai board game designs is Horror House, which was also published in English in the UK by a company called GT Games – unlike most Joy Family games, which were exclusively sold in Japan.



Here is a board game based on the Ghosts & Goblins (Daimakaimura) franchise:



Anyway, I realize that Nintendo Power was a marketing vehicle for Nintendo. But, as that interview also concludes, it was just about as honest as you can get for marketing, because it was made by people who genuinely loved what they were selling. They also had a vision expressed through a visual design philosophy, which I think video games in general have somewhat lost over time. When I see Switch (or other console) cases with repetitive, cluttered, uninspired computer-generated graphics, being sold spine-up on shelves stacked with dozens of other games so you can't really tell what is what without squinting, I do get nostalgic about the visual presentation from bygone times.

[Dark Jaguar]

Nintendo Power is amazing, and getting stuff like a free Dragon Warrior or a month just giving out a full player's guide is a part of that.  I also loved the "big four" comics they made.  That's the Super Mario Adventure, Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Star Fox comics.

[Geno]

I used to be a Nintendo Power subscriber, and I had so many strategy guides. I agree that the maps were really cool. I had all the Donkey Kong Country player's guides, complete with maps of every single level. It was fun just to peruse these guides and look over the maps; I probably spent as much or more time looking at the guides and the maps as I did playing the actual games. It was an addiction, honestly. The comics and the previews of upcoming games were cool, too.

They would also occasionally send VHS tapes to their subscribers previewing upcoming video games, and they were often very cheesy, which just made me love them even more. I loved the Diddy Kong Racing video in particular. "I miss my monkey!" This stuff is etched in my brain forever.

[Dark Jaguar]

I got a few of those video tapes myself!  The Donkey Kong Country one is eternal, but I also have the Star Fox 64 one and... I think one other.  I seem to recall in one video they had "the competition" torturing a Mario doll for intel on the Nintendo 64 or something.  Frankly, I cringe thinking back on the obvious corporate propaganda, but there's still a twinge of nostalgia.

The map design Nintendo had really set a standard that other guide makers had to follow, to varying effect.  I know that PC game guides had totally different layouts.  Those often lacked ANY color maps, instead going for purely text in many cases... but in exchange ooooh the text they had, fully expanding the world and story.  They were less player's guides and more...  expansive lore explorations.

Nintendo Power player's guides varied in quality, and I think they started to go down in that respect midway into the N64 era.  By the time the Gamecube came around, the guides felt very by-the-numbers.  Well, I'll focus on my absolute favorite guides instead then!

Firstly, the Super Mario Bros 3 guide impresses because of just how IN the code that guide got.  It went beyond level maps and into incredible depth on just how various secrets worked, including explaining the background mechanics of the card memorization game so that you could easily predict which of a few set "boards" you got.

Then there was the Super Mario World guide, called "Mario Mania", which outside of just providing the full maps and reveal of secrets, also was a retrospective on the Mario series up to that point.  It got into specifics like the exact run speed and handling of Mario across the mainline games, as well as listing every random cameo appearance in various other games he'd had, and even got into design documents showing some prototyping of concepts like Mario riding a dinosaur.  It also previewed the... "amazing" Super Mario Bros. movie, and even showed some translated interviews with Miyamoto himself.  It functioned as the first time I actually discovered the name behind the character.

The Earthbound guide is a treat, partly because they went and packed a copy in with every copy of the game, in an oversized box.  So as one might imagine, the first few pages function as a game manual to start with.  I loved the conceit of this guide, presenting itself as a travel guide to various vacation spots around the world, as well as a sort of log of Ness' journey.  As was the style of the time, they packed in scratch & sniff cards and little instructions throughout the guide on where to scratch that particular itch for greatest effect.  There's one notable flaw in the guide, in that the instructions on how to get the most powerful bat for Ness are quite wrong, and it actually drops from a different version of that enemy only accessible past the "point of no return", meaning not only is it ridiculously rare there's no way to save that you got one, so it's a bit pointless at that stage in the game to bother.  All in all though, that mistake aside it's still one of the greatest game guides.

Secret of Mana is an interesting case.  There was one text only guide printed out by Square at the time, and another three part full game guide printed in the pages of Nintendo Power over three issues.  Both of them are written in a sort of "journal" style, but the written guide writes it in this second person style "You did this, you felt that", where the Nintendo Power one goes first person "I did this, we felt that".  While neither guide lists every single secret, the better of the two in my opinion is the one in Nintendo power, simply for the incredible hand drawn art.  It's both fantastical and rather "gritty" for lack of a better word, certainly not the generic "anime" style that would permeate the genre in years to come.  If you want a close example, look at the drawn art in the NES Zelda manuals.  Not the prologue part, but the style used when you get to the lists of items and enemies.

Speaking of, we get to what's still my favorite player's guide, and that's Link to the Past.  Once again, it has a conceit and this time it's as a historical book writing about events of the past.  The art design is amazing, once again in that half-gritty-half-fairy tale look.  The guide is split into two "parts", both covering the whole game, but in different levels of detail.  One is a lighter "here's the basics" guide, and the other a much more long form "here's every single detail" version.  Along the way, the guide has all kinds of added details about the world, the people in it, and the various items along the way.  From the specifics of rupees and their various shapes and colors, to the nature of the witch's cook pot, to some added details on the "imprisoning war" that would later be covered in Ocarina of Time, to specifically placing the events of the NES Zelda games as happening long after this one and with a different Link, it has quite a lot.  I recall it going into the nature of Hylian clothing and what influenced it's design, as well as particulars and histories of locations in both the worlds of light and darkness.  It also mentioned that "long eared" hylians were said to "hear the voices of the gods", distinguishing them from those with regular rounded ears.

Depending on just what you wanted, you could go in depth or just for the light touch, and of course at the very end it'd list all the collectibles.  I got this guide some time after I'd already beaten Link to the Past and found everything on my own, and yet I didn't regret having it at all.  It was THAT well made!

Ah the letters section...  People forget there was a time when Nintendo directly encouraged fans to make fan art and the like!  I loved seeing some of the more amazing examples of artwork in there, as well as pictures of costumes or even some photos of fan games.  Now, Nintendo seems intent to take ALL of that down, but it just goes to show that any time a company defends a "takedown notice" by claiming they MUST do it to keep their license... it's a lie.  No they don't, and there's too many examples to count where a company gave their blessing to a fan project.  Heck a more recent example is Capcom not just giving their blessing to a fan made "Megaman Vs Street Fighter" game, but HOSTING it on their own web site.  When a company issues that cease and desist, that's a choice they made, every time.