I haven’t had a subscription for a few years now, but perhaps some of the readers here may be getting the very last issue of Nintendo Power in a few days. Yes, it’s all over on December 11.
I’ll be especially sad to see it go. Nintendo Power holds a special place in my memories, because reading it in my childhood fueled my ambition to create this site.
Remember Volume 94, March 1997, page 51?
That was my first exposure to the Satellaview. To BS Zelda. Nintendo Power opened my world to the video games I’d never get to play because of the less fortunate downsides to being born in the USA. Unfortunately, the same article also held the empty promise of the “Game Pak” BS Zelda for American audiences. But who knows? Maybe a prototype of that is lying around somewhere…
Nintendo Power would sparingly make reference to the Satellaview since that article, it’s information on the device seemingly completely dried up. I’d eventually be convinced later that they actually did not know much more about the Satellaview outside their own press coverage.
That Nintendo Power article lingered in my mind as I explored the early “BS Zelda Homepage”, and attempted to dig up for information in the earlier days. Of course, when I got pretty far along and I figured I’d want to add something else to the BS Zelda Homepage, eventually I requested the article itself scanned. I considered it that important.
I’m pretty certain that without Nintendo Power, there wouldn’t be Satellablog. Nintendo Power got me entranced with BS Zelda by making it appear awesome and then failing to actually deliver, driving the old “Japan gets all the good games” fuel. They got me entranced with the Satellaview by making it sound like the most cryptic, mysterious, strange thing Nintendo ever made.
For a while, I related my progress on Satellaview research in comparison to what Nintendo Power said and knew. Perhaps I saw it as the older, experienced, friendly rival at first. When I realized as I was writing up Satellablog articles that the BS Zelda Homepage and the Satellablog team had outdone Nintendo Power’s knowledge base on the device, I felt a strange combination of pride in the accomplishment and disappointment in the ease of it.
Nintendo Power is also pretty important to the Satellaview for, well, actually being on it. Nintendo Power magazines were sent to users, in raw English, in digital magazine format by St.GIGA. One can still find one of the ROMs for it in the GoodSNES sets.
When thinking of that, it makes me feel like somehow, the Satellaview’s died again. Or at least yet another piece of it.
I hope some Nintendo Power staff/ex-staff are checking this all out. The magazine will be missed, but I think it’s still a possibility that they can contribute here. I’d especially like confirmation on whether the BS Zelda Game Pak got any further than NP teasing about it.
If there’s an afterlife for magazines, then lets’ hope this one is some place higher…
… Fighting it’s way through enemy fire.
I’ll forever have your power. Nintendo Power.
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