If you are old enough to remember rummaging through issue after issue of classic gaming magazines such as Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro, then you remember what an invaluable source of information Nintendo Power was. Its pages offered ream upon ream of tips, secrets, maps, guides, and lots of advertising for the readership to salivate over.
Long past are the glory days of these magazines. I haven’t personally bought a Nintendo Power in at least a decade, though I was privy to some of the newer issues. Interesting features, previews and reviews lined the colourful sheaths of the struggling rag. I am sad to say the days for Nintendo Power, after 24 years of publishing this cornerstone magazine, are numbered.
A source at Ars Technica, a popular technology e-zine writes:
Nintendo Power is one of the longest-running game magazines in the country, having been published continuously since the summer of 1988, when it started as a bi-monthly outgrowth of the previous Nintendo Fun Club newsletter. Nintendo produced and distributed the magazine (with articles that were often just thinly veiled marketing copy) from 1989 through late 2007, when it started contracting the brand out for a more independent angle from tech-and-game-focused Future Publishing.
But our source says that Nintendo, which was always “difficult to work with,” was uninterested in renewing that contract or in taking part in a number of digital initiatives that Future saw as necessary for the long-term health of the brand. He added that Nintendo doesn’t seem interested in taking over direct control of the magazine again (Nintendo and Future representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story).
Nintendo Power editors and staffers were told of the magazine’s impending shuttering last week, the source said, and are currently being transitioned to work on other Future properties, including GamesRadar and MacLife magazine. The move should not affect Future’s other gaming magazines, which include official periodicals for the PlayStation and Xbox brands, as well as Best Buy’s @Gamer.
Nintendo Power still has lots of content for their last few issues, and I will most assuredly be picking up that very final magazine. For those of you with old collections of these things, hold onto them now more closely than ever, since I predict a heightened collector’s market for them in the very near future.
I have to admit that, though the victory of new-school journalism over the old guard of paper-and-ink magazines allows smaller e-zines like Levelsave.com to flourish, this news struck me right in my big, soft, old, nostalgic heart. I can’t help feeling that, with the death of MCA, and now this, my entire childhood is being swept up in the sands of time.
Revisit the first issue over at RetroMag!
I remember rushing to the library at school whenever a new one released to be the first to read it. I would read it and the few issues before almost every day until the next one came out.
It and Electronic Gaming Monthly were the two things that kept me going through elementary/middle school. It is really sad to hear that it won’t be around for other students to enjoy like I did.
This is terrible…
Nintendo Power was the first gaming magazine I ever read and also the first magazine subscription my parents ever purchased for me. Tis sad to hear of their closing.