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.