Nintendo Power and EGM: When a Magazine Was the Only Cheat Code You Needed

There was a particular weight to the mailbox on the days it arrived. Not the weight of the magazine itself, though Nintendo Power was substantial — glossy pages, dense with screenshots, the fold-out poster that came with certain issues adding extra bulk — but the weight of anticipation that had been building for four weeks. You knew roughly when it was coming. You’d watched the mailbox with increasing attention as the days mounted. And then one day it was there, rubber-banded and slightly bent from being folded to fit, and you would take it inside and read it cover to cover, immediately, starting with whatever was on the cover and not stopping.

This was how you found out what was happening in gaming. There was no other way.

The Ecosystem of the Gaming Press

The golden age of the gaming magazine roughly tracks the late 1980s through the late 1990s, with different titles peaking at different points within that window. Nintendo Power launched in 1988 as a direct replacement for Nintendo Fun Club News, a simpler newsletter that Nintendo had been sending to registered console owners. The transition to Nintendo Power represented a genuine editorial ambition: this would be a real magazine, with game coverage, tips sections, maps, reader letters, and the institutional backing of Nintendo itself.

That institutional backing was both the magazine’s greatest strength and its obvious limitation. Nintendo Power was, effectively, a Nintendo marketing organ. It covered Nintendo products almost exclusively, reviewed them favourably, and did not publish criticism that would reflect badly on Nintendo’s games or business decisions. Everyone reading it understood this implicitly by about 1990, and it didn’t much diminish the magazine’s appeal, because the information it contained was still genuinely useful and unavailable anywhere else.

Electronic Gaming Monthly, launched in 1989 by Steve Harris, occupied a different space. EGM covered all platforms and all publishers, which gave it the freedom to be critical — and it was, pointedly, in ways that felt transgressive if your only previous gaming publication had been Nintendo Power. EGM introduced the panel review format, with four reviewers each giving a game a score out of ten, and the divergence between those scores was often more informative than any single review. A game that scored 8, 8, 5, 5 was telling you something specific about who it was for. EGM also broke news in ways that mattered: import coverage, arcade previews, announcements from Japanese gaming shows that American readers would otherwise not encounter for months.

GameFan, GamePro, and later GameInformer filled further niches. GameFan had a devoted following for its import coverage and its willingness to discuss Japanese games that hadn’t reached American shores. GamePro aimed younger and pitched itself as more accessible. Each magazine had its own voice, its own tone, its own stable of writers with names that regular readers knew and trusted — or distrusted — the way sports fans know sportswriters.

The Map Supplement

Nintendo Power’s maps were remarkable objects. A full pull-out map of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda, printed on a single large sheet that you had to carefully unfold and then re-fold along different seams to make it usable during play. Walkthroughs for Super Mario Bros. that showed every warp zone, every hidden block with coins, every path through every level. These were not approximations or illustrations — they were documentation, compiled by people who had played the games exhaustively and recorded what they found, printed at a scale that made them genuinely useful at arm’s length from the television.

Before the internet, the knowledge in those maps was genuinely rare. Your options for finding a secret area in Zelda were: stumble into it yourself, get told by a friend who’d stumbled into it, or find it in a magazine. The friend network was geographically limited and unreliable. The magazine was systematic and reproducible, which made it precious in a way that’s difficult to convey now, when the complete information for any game is three search terms away.

There was also the specific joy of reading about games you didn’t own. A Nintendo Power walkthrough for a game you’d been hoping to get for your birthday was a kind of preparation — you’d read the strategy, study the map, understand the geography of a world you hadn’t yet visited, and then when you finally had the cartridge in your hands, you’d play as though you already half-knew the place. It was advance research for a journey you were looking forward to.

The Screenshot as Promise

The visual vocabulary of gaming magazines was almost entirely screenshots, and screenshots in that era were doing enormous work. A game that hadn’t been released yet could only be communicated through the images a publisher chose to release, which meant preview coverage consisted of two or three screenshots carefully selected to make the game look as good as possible. A single good screenshot, in the absence of any other information, became the entire basis for your anticipation of a game.

This created a particular kind of hope that was sometimes misplaced. You’d see a screenshot of a game — say, the notorious Atari Jaguar version of Alien vs. Predator, or an early screenshot of a Super Nintendo game that showed a sophisticated-looking scene — and build an entire expectation around those few images. When the game arrived and looked nothing like the screenshot in motion, or the screenshot turned out to be the only visually interesting moment in the entire game, the disappointment was specific and familiar.

The opposite happened too, and more memorably. Screenshots of Final Fantasy VI in Nintendo Power, showing the elaborate sprite work and the cinematic staging of certain scenes, created an anticipation that the actual game exceeded. Donkey Kong Country’s pre-rendered 3D graphics looked almost too good to be real in magazine scans, and the actual cartridge confirmed that they were real, that this was genuinely what the SNES was producing. Matching and exceeding a screenshot was a different kind of feeling than falling short of one.

Letters, High Scores, and Reader Culture

Nintendo Power’s reader letters section was called Pak Watch and later Counselor’s Corner, and the reader questions were printed alongside staff answers that ranged from genuinely helpful to cheerfully evasive. Kids wrote in asking how to get past specific parts of games, and the counselors would walk them through it in print, which meant the answers appeared in an issue that came out six to eight weeks after the letter was submitted and were useful to anyone who happened to be stuck in the same place.

The high score sections were something different: a genuine leaderboard, printed monthly, with readers submitting their scores along with photographs of their television screens as evidence. The top scores in certain games were stratospheric — achieved by dedicated players who had clearly spent hundreds of hours optimising their approach — and the community of people competing for those positions was real, even if it was distributed across the country and communicating entirely through postal submissions to a magazine.

EGM did something wonderful with its letters section in the early 90s. Readers would write in with tips and strategies for difficult games, and the letters column became a kind of crowdsourced strategy guide, with readers sharing information they’d discovered independently. The knowledge was real but unverified, which occasionally produced confidently wrong tips that circulated for years. The persistent rumour about unlocking Akuma in Street Fighter II before Super Street Fighter II Turbo actually gave players Akuma spread through letters and playground conversation, and it was false, but the epistemology of pre-internet gaming culture had no reliable mechanism for correction. A false tip in a magazine could live on indefinitely.

The Demo Disc Era

When CD-ROM became viable for home consoles in the mid-90s, gaming magazines on both sides of the Atlantic began including demo discs with issues, and this changed the magazine relationship fundamentally. Official PlayStation Magazine, launched in the UK in 1995 and the US in 1997, bundled a demo disc with every issue, and those discs contained playable samples of upcoming games, trailers, and behind-the-scenes content.

The arrival of each new OPM disc was its own ritual. You’d load it first, before reading a word of the magazine, and work through whatever was on it. A demo for a game you were interested in was thrilling; a demo for something you’d been lukewarm on could completely change your mind in either direction. The demo for Crash Bandicoot was many players’ first encounter with the PS1’s 3D capabilities at their early best, and it sold the game — and arguably the console — to players who had been skeptical.

But the demo disc also introduced a particular frustration: the artificially truncated demo. You’d be given the first level of a game, or a specific time-limited scenario, and just as you were becoming invested, it would end with a “Buy the full game” screen. The cut-off was sometimes placed precisely at a moment of maximum anticipation — a boss fight about to begin, a plot development about to be revealed — and you’d be left with forty minutes of investment and nowhere to put it until you could get to a shop.

What the Magazines Were Actually For

The practical argument for gaming magazines — that they provided information unavailable elsewhere — became progressively less true through the late 90s as the internet became a real presence in daily life. By 1999, you could find walkthroughs, cheat codes, news, and reviews online, often faster and in more depth than any monthly magazine could provide. The magazines responded by emphasising long-form writing, personality, and the physical experience of a printed publication — and then, one by one, they stopped printing.

Nintendo Power, the one that started it all, published its final issue in December 2012 after 24 years. The last issue included a retrospective of the magazine’s history and a series of pieces by writers and industry figures who’d been shaped by it. The response was genuinely emotional for the generation that had grown up with it, which said something about what the magazine had actually been.

It wasn’t really an information delivery mechanism, though it was that. It was a place where gaming felt taken seriously, where the things you cared about were treated as worthy of careful attention, where the knowledge of how to complete a game was documented and shared as though it mattered — because, to the people who needed it, it did. The subscription arriving in the mail was proof that you were part of something, that the thing you were interested in had a community and a record and a voice. The magazine was the institution that made the hobby real.

That function hasn’t disappeared. It’s just distributed differently now, across forums and videos and wikis and streaming channels, none of which arrive rubber-banded in the mailbox on a Tuesday afternoon and stay creased along the fold lines for the rest of the month.