168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nintendo Power was the first magazine I ever subscribed to, and it was my first real impresꦚsion I got of the wide world of video games beyond the bedroom CRTs where my friends and I played.
Growing up, my family was Switzerland in the console wars. My older sister owned a Sega Genesis, so I grew up on Ristar and Aladdin. But, she also had an original Game Boy, and when I was five, I got a Game Boy Pocket with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Blue as a Christmas gift. My first console was an N64. By the time I got my second, the console wars had ended and Sega’s mascot ⛦lived 💖on my purple GameCube.
At some point around then, I must have begged my parents to subscribe me to Nintendo Power, though I don’t remember how I heard about the magazine. This was back when game cases still came loaded with instruction manuals and paper ads. A subscription card may just have fallen out of my copy of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario Sunshine.
All of my friends were also Nintendo kids. In fact, one of my favorite birthday parties was something I christened “NintendoFest.” It was mostly just a regular birthday party with pizza and cake. But, I had my three closest friends over to pull an all-nighter playing GameCube games. I remember speeding through a bunch of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Wind Waker’s early dungeons together, passinཧg the controller back-a🐬nd-forth.
In those days, Nintendo Power was my only reliable source for information. The long-running magazine, which ran from 1988 through 2012, told me what the big games were, how critics felt about them, and what Mario spin-offs were coming out that month. It played an important role in forming my sense of humor, too. The mail section went through multiple iterations over the years, but I remember it as “Pulse," and it was where the magazine's editors most got to stretch their creative muscles. Though I’m now 99 percent sure it was a fake, I laughed so hard I cried at a letter from grandparents trying to send birthday wishes to their grandkids that accidentally ended up at the Nintendo Power office.
It was what got me interested in games as a hobby. Or, at least, as a hobby whose future I was deeply invested in. I doubt I would have had any idea what E3 was or what was announced at the conference each year if not for Nintendo Power’s multi-page spreads. It’s tied up with some of my most potent childhood nostalgia, too. I’ll never forget reading the issue with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mario Kart: Double Dash on the cover while sprawled out on the carpet by our roaring fireplace in the winter. I likewise won’t forget the Double Dash-inspired races I had with friends at my school’s big sledding hill, where the person in the front steered and the person in the back pushed other kids off course or threw snowballs. I also can’t forget hiding the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4 issue f💦acedown so my parents wouldn’t see the big monster on the cover and take it aw🌱ay from me (this would not have actually happened).
As much as the games I played shaped my memories, the writing I read about games was just as formative. It gave me a framework to understand the games that had come before and with which to evaluate the games that had the potential to change the medium's future. Long live Nintendo Power!