Before walkthroughs could be searched online and long before a player could pull up a video showing exactly how to defeat a boss, video game magazines were part of the equipment that surrounded a console. A difficult level could send a player back through an old issue looking for a map, password, secret passage, or strategy that had been printed months before. During the height of the Nintendo Entertainment System and the arrival of the Super Nintendo, one of the publications filling that role was Game Players Nintendo Guide.
The name is deceptively simple because the magazine spent much of its life under other titles. Its history runs through The Game Player’s Guide to Nintendo, Game Player’s Nintendo Buyer’s Guide, Game Player’s Nintendo Strategy Guide, and Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games before the familiar Game Players Nintendo Guide title appeared near the end of 1991.
Behind those changes was Signal Research, a Greensboro, North Carolina publisher founded by Robert C. Lock, who had previously worked for COMPUTE! Publications. What began in 1988 as an experiment in guides for Nintendo and computer games became a family of magazines, encyclopedias, show guides, and platform-specific publications. By the time the Nintendo magazine disappeared as a separate title in 1993, it had helped establish a publishing line that continued under the Game Players name for years.
The Game Player’s Guide To Nintendo
The earliest point in the story is the Winter 1988 issue of The Game Player’s Guide to Nintendo. The Video Game History Foundation identifies it as the first chronological issue in the Game Player’s publishing family and preserves three different versions of it.
It was substantial for something that would eventually become part of a continuing magazine series. The issue ran 116 pages and focused on Nintendo games at a moment when the Nintendo Entertainment System was rapidly expanding its American audience.
There was also an immediate complication.
The word Nintendo appeared so prominently in the publication’s title that Signal Research soon began placing an advisory sticker on the cover explaining that the magazine was not affiliated with Nintendo of America. The issue was later reprinted under the title Game Player’s Nintendo Buyer’s Guide.
That distinction mattered. Game Player’s was not Nintendo’s magazine. It was an independent publication covering Nintendo products, which would eventually allow its editors to develop their own mixture of strategy coverage, news, reviews, ratings, reader mail, and industry reporting.
The Winter 1988 Nintendo issue was followed by The Game Player’s Guide to MS-DOS Computer Games. Another Nintendo strategy issue followed, then another MS-DOS issue. Rather than continue alternating indefinitely between console and computer coverage, Signal Research soon reorganized the idea into separate publications.
That decision created one of the most confusing numbering systems in the history of American video game magazines.
Starting Over At Volume One
After the original four-issue Game Player’s Guide experiment, Signal Research relaunched its publications as separate Nintendo, PC, and general gaming magazines. Each restarted its numbering at Volume 1, Number 1.
As a result, more than one early Game Player’s publication can legitimately claim to be Volume 1, Number 1.
The Video Game History Foundation has reconstructed the chronology using surviving issues, mastheads, advertisements, subscription cards, sweepstakes dates, and other contemporary evidence. Its archive identifies Game Player’s Nintendo Buyer’s Guide, Volume 1, Number 1, as the first issue of the relaunched dedicated Nintendo publication.
An advertisement in the preceding Game Player’s Guide stated that the magazine would go on sale March 14, 1989. Other dating evidence inside surviving copies supports a March publication window.
From that point forward, the Nintendo magazine became its own continuing series. The Video Game History Foundation records 44 magazines in the dedicated Nintendo run from March 1989 through May 1993. Subscription cards apparently referred to the publication collectively as Game Player’s Guides to Nintendo Games, another variation in a history already crowded with titles.
The changing names were not merely a modern cataloging problem. Signal Research itself repeatedly altered the wording printed on its magazines. Early issues appeared as Game Player’s Nintendo Buyer’s Guide and Game Player’s Nintendo Strategy Guide. By June and July 1989, the continuing series was using Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. An October and November 1989 issue temporarily brought the buyer’s guide wording back as Game Player’s Buyer’s Guide to Nintendo Games.
The magazine was still discovering exactly what it wanted to be.
A Magazine Built Around Getting Through The Game
The word “strategy” in those early titles described the publication well.
Early video games could be difficult, cryptic, and unforgiving. Many provided players with limited instructions once the cartridge was inside the console. Secrets might be hidden behind unmarked walls, passwords had to be written down, adventure games could leave players wandering for hours, and losing all of a player’s lives could erase considerable progress.
A magazine could therefore provide something more useful than a traditional review. It could show how to play.
Signal Research built much of its Nintendo publishing business around that demand. Strategies, screenshots, hints, maps, passwords, secrets, and explanations of particular stages became central parts of its publications.
The company expanded the idea beyond the regular magazine. In 1990, Signal Research published the premiere issue of Game Player’s Encyclopedia of Nintendo Games, with Robert C. Lock serving as editor in chief. The University of Missouri’s Samir Husni Magazine Collection describes the encyclopedia as containing hints, tips, playing strategies, and secrets for numerous NES games. The series eventually extended across multiple volumes.
Signal also produced separate Game Boy material, Sega publications, PC magazines, Consumer Electronics Show guides, and other special publications. The Nintendo magazine was therefore not an isolated experiment. It became one part of an expanding system for turning the rapidly growing video game business into a specialized publishing market.
From An Occasional Guide To A Monthly Magazine
The surviving chronology shows another important transition during 1990 and 1991.
The Nintendo publication had initially appeared less frequently, with issues covering periods such as February and March or April and May. Late in 1990, however, the schedule tightened. The archive records an October 1990 issue, followed by November and December editions. Beginning with Volume 4 in January 1991, the magazine appeared month after month.
That shift changed what a publication like Game Player’s could do.
A strategy guide could remain useful for months, but a monthly magazine could also follow the industry as it happened. New releases, accessories, trade shows, forthcoming games, sales trends, publisher announcements, and competition between hardware companies could accompany the maps and walkthroughs.
The timing was particularly important because Nintendo itself was entering a transitional period. The NES remained enormously important, the Game Boy had created a major portable market, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was bringing 16-bit Nintendo games into American homes.
Instead of choosing one of those systems, Game Player’s increasingly covered all three.
Becoming Game Players Nintendo Guide
The title most readers now associate with the publication arrived in December 1991.
Volume 4, Number 12 is cataloged as Game Players Nintendo Guide. The Video Game History Foundation records Signal Research as publisher, while the surviving issue itself shows how much the magazine had changed since its earlier buyer’s guide identity.
The December 1991 issue was 100 pages long. Retromags identifies Robert C. Lock as editor and records a cover price of $3.95. Inside, the publication covered the NES, Game Boy, and Super Nintendo.
There was an editor’s note and a mailbag in which readers asked about games and strategies. A news department called “Hot Shots!” carried previews, events, bestseller information, accessories, and announcements. Features covered subjects ranging from Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego to Hook. A five-page installment continued a guide to Super Mario World, while another feature supplied maps for Who Framed Roger Rabbit on Game Boy.
The magazine still retained its strategy-guide roots. Its “Super Strategy” section devoted pages to games including Batman: The Return of the Joker, Romance of the Three Kingdoms II, Star Wars, Tom & Jerry, and Bubble Bobble.
But another section showed where the publication was heading. It now carried reviews.
Games including Populous, Super R-Type, and U.N. Squadron were treated as products to be evaluated rather than simply puzzles to be solved. The magazine had evolved from something resembling an oversized strategy manual into something closer to the form readers now recognize as a full video game magazine.
Nintendo’s 8-Bit And 16-Bit Worlds On The Same Pages
By 1992, Game Players Nintendo Guide existed at a particularly interesting point in Nintendo history.
The Super Nintendo had arrived, but the NES had not vanished. The Game Boy had established a third Nintendo market with its own games and audience. A Nintendo publication therefore had to cover three overlapping generations of hardware.
The March 1992 issue demonstrates how Signal Research approached that problem.
Its news pages discussed upcoming Super Nintendo, NES, and Game Boy releases, along with industry subjects such as the Consumer Electronics Show and competition between the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. The issue carried annual Game Players awards and a game-review scoring system, while its longer features still provided the detailed strategies on which the publication had built its reputation.
Contra III: The Alien Wars received a multi-page feature. Other coverage dealt with The Addams Family, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers, Super Off Road, and Terminator 2. Reviews elsewhere in the issue covered titles across all three Nintendo systems.
The result was a publication caught between two eras of video game journalism. Part of it belonged to the 1980s tradition of hints, secrets, and walkthroughs. Another part increasingly resembled the personality-driven news and review magazines that would define much of the 1990s.
An Independent Nintendo Magazine
The advisory sticker placed on that first 1988 issue became more meaningful as the magazine developed.
Despite devoting itself entirely to Nintendo hardware and software, Game Players Nintendo Guide was not produced by Nintendo of America. It belonged to Signal Research.
That gave the magazine a different place within Nintendo culture than an official company publication. By the early 1990s its pages could contain game ratings, broader industry news, reader questions, accessory information, and discussion of Nintendo’s competition with Sega while still devoting substantial space to strategies for Nintendo games.
Its identity was therefore built around Nintendo without being identical to Nintendo itself.
That distinction is one reason the magazine is useful to historians today. Its issues preserve not only information about individual games but evidence of how an independent American gaming publication presented Nintendo to players during the NES and SNES transition.
It recorded which games were being promoted, which accessories were attracting attention, which rumors circulated, which titles were treated as major releases, and what kinds of information editors believed players wanted badly enough to buy a magazine.
Even scholars noticed the publication while it was still current. Marsha Kinder’s 1991 book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games, published by the University of California Press, cited the October and November 1989 Game Player’s Buyer’s Guide to Nintendo Games. The citation identifies Signal Research in Greensboro and demonstrates that the magazine had already become a contemporary source for researchers examining Nintendo culture.
A Larger Game Players Publishing Family
The Nintendo magazine also helped provide the foundation for something larger than itself.
Signal Research developed Game Player’s publications covering PC games, Sega, Game Boy, and general multiplatform gaming. It produced encyclopedias and special guides, while its Consumer Electronics Show publications placed the company within the trade-show culture where new hardware and software were being introduced to retailers, journalists, and the industry.
The Nintendo edition remained particularly important because of its long continuous run. Even as its title changed, its volume numbering carried forward.
That continuity would become significant when Signal Research decided to combine its Nintendo and Sega coverage.
By 1993, maintaining separate magazines for the rival console audiences was giving way to a broader approach. The final stand-alone Game Players Nintendo Guide was Volume 6, Number 5, dated May 1993.
The following month, the magazine became something new.
Nintendo And Sega Under One Cover
June 1993 brought Game Players Nintendo-Sega, Volume 6, Number 6.
The merger ended the dedicated Nintendo magazine, but it did not erase its lineage. The new publication continued the Nintendo magazine’s volume numbering and became the beginning of the next major Game Players series.
Even the issue count carried remnants of the confusing history that began back in 1988.
The Video Game History Foundation notes that the successor Game Players series began with Issue 48 even though only 46 Nintendo issues had actually been produced in the preceding chronology. It is an unusually visible example of the numbering problems created by the early title changes, restarts, reprints, and reorganizations.
The corporate identity was changing at essentially the same moment. The Video Game History Foundation dates Signal Research from June 1988 through May 1993 and GP Publications from June 1993 through May 1995. The last dedicated Nintendo issue therefore sits almost exactly at the dividing line between the two publishing identities.
What disappeared was the idea of Game Players as a magazine devoted only to Nintendo. What survived was the name, numbering lineage, editorial concept, and publishing operation that the Nintendo guides had helped create.
From Game Players To Ultra Game Players
The June 1993 merger was not the end of the publication family.
The Video Game History Foundation traces the resulting Game Players series from June 1993 through September 1996. During those years the magazine continued developing as a multiplatform publication rather than returning to the Nintendo-only approach.
In October 1996, the publication became Ultra Game Players. That title continued through June 1998. A final reworking, Game Buyer, appeared from July through October 1998.
By then the video game press was very different from the one Signal Research had entered a decade earlier. The NES had given way to several newer console generations, gaming journalism had become a crowded field, and magazines were increasingly competing not only with one another but with the growing possibilities of the internet.
Yet the publishing lineage could still be followed backward through those changes to a 116-page Nintendo guide published in 1988.
Preserving A Complicated Magazine History
For many older gaming magazines, reconstructing a publication history can be difficult because issues are scattered among private collections, incomplete scans, libraries, and auction listings.
Game Players is unusually fortunate.
The Video Game History Foundation says its physical collection contains every known issue of the various Game Player’s and Game Players forms, while its digital archive contains almost the entire magazine family. That collection makes it possible to compare title changes, cover variants, mastheads, advertisements, subscription cards, issue numbers, and actual page contents instead of depending entirely on memories written decades later.
Retromags has also preserved and indexed numerous issues, often recording tables of contents, page counts, editors, prices, and the systems or games covered. The University of Missouri preserves related Signal Research publications in the Samir Husni Magazine Collection.
Together those collections reveal something that the simplified title Game Players Nintendo Guide can hide. There was never one clean beginning followed by one unchanging magazine.
There was an experiment, a relaunch, repeated changes of title, a shift from bimonthly publication to monthly publication, the rise of the Game Boy and Super Nintendo, an expansion from strategy writing into news and reviews, and finally a merger that carried the publication into a broader multiplatform future.
Why Game Players Nintendo Guide Matters
Game Players Nintendo Guide matters because it captures a period when learning about a video game often required another physical object.
Players could not assume that every secret would eventually appear in a searchable database. A magazine might be the easiest way to discover a route through a difficult level, find a password, understand an unfamiliar game, or see screenshots from something that had not yet reached local stores.
Signal Research recognized that demand early. Its Nintendo publications began by selling information that could help people choose games and get through them. As the market changed, the magazine changed with it, adding news, reviews, ratings, industry coverage, and attention to multiple Nintendo systems without abandoning the strategies that had made it useful in the first place.
The magazine’s constant renaming can make its history look messy from a distance. Seen through the surviving issues, however, those changes tell the story.
The Game Player’s Guide to Nintendo belonged to the moment when the American NES market was still taking shape. Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games reflected an audience hungry for practical help. Game Players Nintendo Guide belonged to the transition into a larger, faster-moving 1990s game press. Game Players Nintendo-Sega acknowledged that the console market could no longer be neatly divided into isolated camps within the publisher’s own catalog.
From Winter 1988 to the final Nintendo-only issue in May 1993, the magazine changed alongside the games it covered.
Today its pages preserve more than walkthroughs and old review scores. They preserve the way Nintendo games were discussed, marketed, explained, anticipated, and played at the exact moment when the NES, Game Boy, and Super Nintendo were helping transform video games into one of the dominant forms of American entertainment.
Sources & Further Reading
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Game Player’s / Game Players / Game Buyer.” MAG-GAMEPLAYERS. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/1
Signal Research. The Game Player’s Guide to Nintendo. Vol. 1, no. 1. Winter 1988. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/4
Signal Research. Game Player’s Nintendo Buyer’s Guide. Vol. 1, no. 1. Estimated March 1989. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/5
Signal Research. Game Player’s Nintendo Strategy Guide. Vol. 1, no. 2. April/May 1989. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/6
Signal Research. Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. Vol. 2, no. 5. October/November 1989. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/10
Signal Research. Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. Vol. 3, no. 2. April/May 1990. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/13
Signal Research. Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. Vol. 4, no. 3. March 1991. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/21
Signal Research. Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. Vol. 4, no. 6. June 1991. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/24
Signal Research. Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. Vol. 4, no. 10. October 1991. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/28
Signal Research. Game Player’s Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. Vol. 4, no. 11. November 1991. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/29
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo Guide. Vol. 4, no. 12. December 1991. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/30
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo Guide. Vol. 4, no. 13. Winter 1991. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/31
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo Guide. Vol. 5, no. 3. March 1992. Video Game History Foundation Digital Archive. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/2d74c293-57f2-4f54-af5b-bbbbb1a45125
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo Guide. Vol. 5, no. 7. July 1992. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/38
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo Guide. Vol. 5, no. 8. August 1992. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/39
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo Guide. Vol. 5, no. 12. December 1992. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/43
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo Guide. Vol. 6, no. 1. January 1993. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/45
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo Guide. Vol. 6, no. 5. May 1993. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/49
Signal Research. Game Players Nintendo-Sega. Vol. 6, no. 6, issue 48. June 1993. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/subjects/39?filter_fields%5B%5D=primary_type%26filter_values%5B%5D=archival_object%26page=158
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Game Player’s, Nintendo, March 1989-May 1993.” MAG-GAMEPLAYERS Nintendo sub-series. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/114
Video Game History Foundation Digital Archive. “Game Player’s, Nintendo.” Digitized magazine collection. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/80c75029-2c19-48a7-8c34-2d69c21dee2f
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Game Player’s, Sega, Fall 1990-May 1993.” MAG-GAMEPLAYERS Sega sub-series. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/115
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Game Player’s Encyclopedia, 1990-Spring 1994.” MAG-GAMEPLAYERS. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/200
Lock, Robert C., ed. Game Player’s Encyclopedia of Nintendo Games. Greensboro, NC: Signal Research, 1990. Samir Husni Magazine Collection, University of Missouri Libraries Special Collections and Archives. https://library.missouri.edu/specialcollections/items/show/1989
Signal Research and Ocean Software. “Ride the Ocean Wave!” Supplement to Game Players Nintendo Guide. Distributed February 1993. Video Game History Foundation Library. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/2246
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Signal Research.” Corporate authority record. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/agents/corporate_entities/3
Video Game History Foundation Library. “GP Publications, Inc.” Corporate authority record. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/agents/corporate_entities/4
ISSN International Centre. “Game Player’s Nintendo Buyer’s Guide.” ISSN 1041-0376. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1041-0376
Retromags. “Game Players Nintendo Guide.” Publication index. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/publications/united-states/game-players-nintendo-guide/
Retromags. “Game Players Nintendo Guide.” Preserved magazine collection. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.retromags.com/files/category/171-game-players-nintendo-guide/
Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/public/book/playing-with-power-in-movies-television-and-video-games-from-muppet-babies-to-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles.html