Nintendo Power · Issue 1, July/August 1988 · Super Mario Bros. 2
The debut issue of Nintendo Power launched one of gaming's most influential subscriber magazines with a Super Mario Bros. 2 cover, immediately establishing the publication's role as the authoritative guide for NES owners across North America.
Nintendo Power emerged from the wreckage of Nintendo Fun Club News in 1988, transforming a simple newsletter into a full-scale monthly magazine with glossy covers, detailed walkthroughs, and the Nintendo Counselors hotline. The first issue's cover — featuring Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Princess Peach in a colorful montage for SMB2 — set the visual template the magazine would follow for years. Nintendo Power became the information lifeline for millions of American children before the internet, a gatekeeper of gaming knowledge whose pull-out maps and tips were shared in schoolyards across the country. The magazine ran for 285 issues, outlasting the NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and Wii before ceasing publication in December 2012.
Launching what became the definitive Nintendo-era gaming magazine and establishing the template for game-publication partnerships that lasted into the digital era.
Nintendo Power arrived at a moment when American gamers had no reliable source of game information beyond word of mouth and the occasional tip in general-interest computer magazines. The Fun Club News newsletter had demonstrated that there was an enormous appetite for Nintendo content, but it was a crude instrument — black and white, sporadic, thin on actual gameplay guidance. Nintendo Power was the professional realization of that appetite, arriving with full-color photography, glossy paper, and a production quality that signaled gaming was serious business.
The editorial relationship between Nintendo Power and its parent company was openly acknowledged from the start — this was not independent journalism but official communication from Nintendo to its customers. This arrangement created a magazine that was simultaneously extremely useful (accurate information, early coverage of upcoming games, genuine walkthroughs) and commercially compromised (no negative reviews, no coverage of competitor platforms). Players understood this bargain implicitly and made it anyway, because the alternative was knowing nothing at all.
The first issue's coverage of Super Mario Bros. 2 was particularly valuable because SMB2 was a genuinely confusing game for players used to the original — the vegetable-pulling mechanic, the different character attributes, the varied environments were all departures from Mario conventions. Nintendo Power's detailed level guides and character breakdowns were exactly the kind of content that justified a subscription, and they set the magazine's editorial priorities for the next two decades.
For a generation of American gamers who grew up in the late 1980s and 1990s, Nintendo Power was the primary medium through which gaming culture was transmitted. Its previews determined which upcoming games generated playground excitement; its reviews (uniformly positive as they were) created a shared critical vocabulary; its Nintendo Power Awards gave the community a sense of collective taste. The magazine was a social document as much as a consumer guide.
The pull-out maps and posters that came with many issues were genuine artifacts of gaming culture — spread on bedroom floors, tacked to walls, passed between friends. In an era before GameFAQs and YouTube, a Nintendo Power map of Hyrule or a Super Metroid poster was a genuine treasure, a physical connection to the games that consumed after-school hours. The magazine understood this and leaned into it, making the tangible extras as important as the written content.