Nintendo Power To Shut Down

stillnotelf writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the official Nintendo magazine, Nintendo Power, is shutting down after 24 years. The gaming magazine has been run by independent publisher Future US since 2007, but Ars Technica's source and deleted Twitter posts say that Nintendo is uninterested in continuing the paper magazine in today's digital age, and also unwilling to convert it into a primarily digital experience. There's been no official confirmation of the cancellation or word of how many issues remain of this bit of childhood nostalgia for so many gamers."

Comments

Noooo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now where will I get my biased game reviews from?

Re:Noooo!

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

Gamespot, like everyone else.

Re:Noooo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Metacritic (their secret is that they pretend to be unbiased).

Re:Noooo!

[noh8rz7]

to be fair, so many nintendo-designed games are incredibly awesome, and it was cool to dedicate an entire issue of nintendo power to them. remember the zelda cartridges came in gold? that was cool too.

Re:Noooo!

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit. This is about Nintendo Power, not Nintendo. If Nintendo were to shut down the Internet would explode and millions of gamers around the world would simultaneously commit suicide by banging their heads against bricks, jumping down random pipes, and eating strange mushrooms.

Now how will I know that renting games is wrong?

[Kenja]

All other sources refuse to cover how renting games is "grey market" and wrong.

Package nintendopower has been deprecated.

[cwrinn]

This package has been superceded by the package nintendochannel, proceed with install? [Y/n]

Re:RIP

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

Yes, if that family member was clearly a corporate shill.

I miss Uncle Unilever.

I had the very first issue

[m93]

Got it when I was in 3rd grade. Had a subscription for years afterward. That was a great time to be a kid and be fortunate enough to have access to high-tech gadgets like the NES/Super NES.

Re:I had the very first issue

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Nintendo power was fun propoganda to get you hyped up to play video games in the 80s. As a kid, I loved that stuff. Games were already fun, but when you have a magazine talking about strategies, and easter eggs when there was no internet to get any discussion, that was indeed great times!

NES era was a huge time in my childhood because the jump from atari2600 to NES was so huge that you never knew what they could make next as a video game, and the games for NES were really fun compared to atari2600 games which rapidly got boring, but I played them anyway because there was no alternative. Around 1989 is when I realized I wanted to be come a computer game programmer, and it was when I was standing around a bunch of NES games we played out and I was getting kinda bored with.

Re:I had the very first issue

[mister_playboy]

I got started with the issue that came with a free game(!) It was Dragon Warrior, the start of my RPGing...

Not sure what issue that was, but it was probably a bit later (#12 or so).

Re:I had the very first issue

[JDG1980]

The problem I always had with the NES is despite the "Nintendo seal of quality" the amount of shitty shovelware they let into the channel was just insane. For every decent game you probably had a dozen truly crap games, not even counting all the movie license crap they let loose upon their system like a chili fart on a bus. Friday The 13th or Total Recall anyone?

All consoles had (and have) a lot of "shitty shovelware", but the ratio of good games to bad games on the NES was higher than on most other systems. Nintendo limited each third-party licensee to a certain number of games released per year, so this meant that a lot of the worst Famicom games never made it to America. (Of course, quite a few good games didn't, either.)

And not all licensed titles for the NES were bad. The NES version of Batman, for instance, was a very good platformer. DuckTales was a well-designed game, too.

Woz

[guttentag]

Steve Wozniak was denied a Game Boy Tetris high-score listing in Nintendo Power, so he resubmitted his score with his name spelled backwards (Evets Kainzow), and they printed it! Classic moment in crossover Apple/Nintendo geekery... They later gave in and published his photo and a paragraph about his Tetris obsession.

For those who remember Nintendo Power and are feeling nostalgic, there's a good cover gallery with a smattering of selected inside pages (sadly, Woz's high score in issue 24 doesn't seem to be among the scans).

Sad to hear

[flimflammer]

If only for nostalgic reasons. I used to read Nintendo Power in the 80s and early 90s. My friend had and probably still has a huge stack of them from that time period. I felt similarly sad when GamePro suffered the same fate. I used to read those all the time back in the 90s.

It's kind of like hearing that a relative or old friend you haven't seen in years died.

Kinda sad

[ildon]

As a kid I had a subscription to Ninteno Power from like 1990 until 1998. Sad to see it go but I honestly hadn't looked at an issue since then. The internet (and me not being a kid, as it was clearly marketed at the 10-16 year old demographic) made it totally irrelevant. I'm honestly surprised it managed to stick around this long.

Final Fantasy Fanny Pack

[Daetrin]

I remember the promotional material they did for the original Final Fantasy. It seemed like that went on forever, but i was a kid so it was probably only one or two issues right before the game came out. Then the next three issues after it came out they did trivia contests. I entered all three, and got second place in one of them!

I won... a neon pink fanny pack. I believe it came stuffed with a t-shirt and some chocolate coins. The t-shirt was kind of crappy, and the coins were quickly consumed. And the neon pink fanny pack was... neon pink and a fanny pack. So kind of the worst prize ever, but i remember the shit out of having actually won something!

Re:Final Fantasy Fanny Pack

[Daetrin]

Also, it's kind of obligatory:

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3601117/Nintendo_Power_1988_(Retromags.com)_(.cbr)
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3601118/Nintendo_Power_1989_(Retromags.com)_(.cbr)
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3601119/Nintendo_Power_1990_(Retromags.com)_(.cbr)
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3601120/Nintendo_Power_1991_(Retromags.com)_(.cbr)
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3601121/Nintendo_Power_1992_(Retromags.com)_(.cbr)
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3601122/Nintendo_Power_1993_(Retromags.com)_(.cbr)
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3601123/Nintendo_Power_1994_(Retromags.com)_(.cbr)
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3602630/Nintendo_Power_1995_(Retromags.com)_(.cbr)

Sadly they seem to have stopped uploading torrents of them after that point, but it does cover most of the time i had a subscription and was seriously interested in it.

bad decision on digital

[petsounds]

Nintendo Power is one of the few magazines that could have thrived in a digital format, due mainly to their enthusiastic fanbase. I think quite a number of people would have subscribed to a digital version of Nintendo Power that had exclusive sneakpeak videos, developer interviews, NES game emulations, et al. I think it shows that Nintendo still doesn't 'get' how the internet can benefit them.

I haven't read Nintendo Power since I had a NES back in the '80s, but I have fond memories of it. It was a classy mag with good features; at least the kid version of me thought so. Good quality paper stock, nice art direction. I remember the multi-page dungeon maps of Legend of Zelda. I remember the Legend of Zelda 2 preview and thinking it looked like the best game ever, and then I got the game and it totally was. Metal Gear, Ninja Gaiden. I remember looking at those previews and wondering how a videogame could look so cool. Heady times for videogamers. Constant innovation (well, at least from the top studios) because the industry was still so young.