For millions of American children growing up during the Nintendo Entertainment System era, getting stuck in a video game once meant something very different than it does today. There was no YouTube walkthrough waiting on a phone, no searchable wiki explaining the location of every secret item, and no online forum where another player had already answered the same question. A difficult dungeon, hidden passage, or unexplained password could stop a player for days.
Nintendo understood that problem almost as soon as the Nintendo Entertainment System began finding an audience in the United States. The company operated telephone lines where players could call for help, mailed information directly to registered customers, and eventually created a publication that combined advertising, customer service, strategy guide, fan club, and gaming magazine into one unusually successful package.
That publication was Nintendo Power.
Beginning with a 108-page July/August 1988 issue dominated by Super Mario Bros. 2, Nintendo Power grew into one of the defining institutions of American video game culture. Its maps showed players where to go, its screenshots revealed games they had never seen in stores, its contests offered extravagant prizes, its characters turned Nintendo employees into personalities, and its arrival in a mailbox could make an upcoming game feel important months before the player ever touched it.
Over twenty-four years, the magazine followed Nintendo from the NES through the Super NES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, GameCube, Nintendo DS, Wii, and into the opening days of the Wii U. When its final issue appeared in December 2012, Nintendo Power had reached Volume 285. The complete main run is now preserved by the Video Game History Foundation, along with supplements, subscriber letters, and other surviving material that documents how one company magazine became part of the childhood of a generation.
Before Nintendo Power
The origins of Nintendo Power were tied directly to one of Nintendo’s earliest problems in the American market: players wanted information.
When Nintendo introduced the NES in the United States in the mid-1980s, games could be cryptic. Players were expected to experiment, memorize patterns, discover invisible objects, interpret limited instructions, and sometimes find secrets that were never clearly explained inside the game itself. Nintendo’s Howard Phillips later remembered that the company quickly realized children wanted to know not only which games were coming next, but how to play the games they already owned.
Nintendo responded partly with its Game Counselor operation. Players could telephone Nintendo and speak with people who knew the company’s games well enough to explain bosses, secrets, stages, and troublesome sections. Phillips recalled beginning with only a handful of counselors before demand helped the operation grow dramatically.
The telephone, however, was an expensive way to answer the same questions repeatedly. Nintendo already had something that offered a cheaper solution. Registration cards packed with games and hardware encouraged customers to send their names and addresses to the company. Those customers could become members of the Nintendo Fun Club and receive Nintendo Fun Club News, a small publication filled with product information, tips, and Nintendo news.
By 1988, Nintendo Fun Club News had become the bridge between Nintendo’s early customer outreach and the magazine that followed. The Video Game History Foundation preserves issues from Winter 1987 through June/July 1988, and its archival description confirms that the final issue opened with an announcement for Nintendo Power and invited Fun Club members to subscribe.
From a Free Newsletter to Nintendo Power
The success of the Fun Club created its own financial problem. Gail Tilden, who became the creator and first editor-in-chief of Nintendo Power, remembered that the Fun Club mailing list had reached around 600,000 people. Printing and mailing free material to an audience that large consumed an increasing portion of Nintendo’s marketing budget.
At the same time, Nintendo executives were looking toward Japan, where magazines devoted enormous amounts of space to games. Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa believed American players might respond to the same kind of detailed coverage.
The idea was not simply to tell consumers that a game existed. It was to help them understand the game after purchasing it.
Tilden later explained that Nintendo had also experimented with the Official Nintendo Player’s Guide, which offered the maps and detailed gameplay information that would become central to Nintendo Power. Arakawa had seen Japanese publications supporting games with extensive maps and strategies, and he believed that helping consumers progress through games could make them more satisfied with what they had purchased.
That mattered greatly to Nintendo in the 1980s. The American video game business had recently experienced the devastating market collapse of the early 1980s, and Nintendo remained conscious of the possibility that consumers might once again lose confidence in video games. A child repeatedly receiving expensive games that proved frustrating or disappointing was not simply a disappointed customer. From Nintendo’s perspective, that family might abandon the category altogether.
Nintendo Power therefore emerged from a combination of marketing and customer service. It would promote Nintendo products, but it would also try to make owning them easier and more rewarding.
Naming the Power
Even the magazine’s name came directly from Nintendo’s larger American marketing strategy.
During the late 1980s Nintendo had increasingly emphasized the slogan “Now you’re playing with power.” Tilden recalled that several possible magazine names were considered, including variations such as Power Player, but Arakawa insisted on one requirement: the word “Nintendo” needed to appear in the title.
Combining the company’s name with the language of its advertising produced something simple and memorable.
Nintendo Power.
The phrase fit the publication particularly well. The magazine was selling the idea that knowledge itself gave players power. Knowing where a hidden room was located, which weapon damaged a boss, how to enter a password, or which new game deserved attention could transform the experience of owning an NES.
The name that began as corporate branding eventually became a description of the magazine’s role.
Building Volume One Across the Pacific
Creating the magazine required an unusually international production process.
Nintendo of America worked with Japanese publishing and design partners, including Tokuma and the Tokyo design company Work House. Howard Phillips later remembered that printing and much of the early production work took place in Japan. Tilden and Phillips traveled across the Pacific to examine layouts and editorial material, with Tilden recalling that producing an issue could involve multiple trips to Japan.
The operation was surprisingly small. Phillips remembered only about half a dozen people scattered among Nintendo of America, Work House, and Tokuma during the magazine’s earliest stage. Nintendo decided what games should receive attention, established departments such as “Classified Information” and “Video Shorts,” wrote copy, and worked with Japanese designers experienced in creating the dense maps and layouts common in Japanese game publications.
Cultural differences occasionally appeared in the process. American and Japanese staff did not always agree on colors, fonts, backgrounds, or other design choices. Tilden remembered pushing the Japanese team toward a visual presentation she believed would better suit American readers.
The result reached readers during the summer of 1988.
The Video Game History Foundation’s preserved copy identifies Volume 1 as the July/August 1988 issue and records it at 108 pages. The issue was edited by Gail Tilden and built around Super Mario Bros. 2, with additional coverage showing players the kind of information that would define the magazine for years.
The Clay Mario Cover
The first cover became one of the most recognizable pieces of video game magazine artwork ever produced.
Rather than simply printing a conventional illustration or screenshot, Nintendo’s advertising partners turned to three-dimensional artwork. According to Tilden, Griffith’s Advertising handled the early cover work, and Will Vinton Studios in Oregon created the clay Mario model photographed for the debut issue.
Mario appears lifting a turnip while an enemy character looms nearby, recreating the world of Super Mario Bros. 2 in physical form. The unusual approach immediately made the magazine feel different from a simple newsletter.
The cover also established a tradition of visually ambitious Nintendo Power covers. Over the years, illustrations, sculptures, paintings, models, photography, and elaborate compositions transformed the front of the magazine into advertising art in its own right.
Nearly a quarter century later, the staff responsible for the final issue deliberately returned to the idea. Volume 285 recreated the spirit of the original Mario cover using imagery from the contemporary Nintendo era. The beginning and ending of the magazine were visually connected across twenty-four years.
Millions of Copies Through the Mail
Nintendo did not launch its new magazine cautiously.
It used the enormous mailing database it had accumulated through registration cards, customer interactions, and the Nintendo Fun Club to put the magazine directly into the hands of potential subscribers.
The numbers are important because they are sometimes confused in later accounts. Tilden recalled Nintendo sending approximately 3.2 million complimentary copies of the first issue. In a later oral history she placed the total after multiple mailings at roughly 3.3 million. About 1.3 million people, she recalled, converted into paid subscribers.
Those were not three million paying subscribers. They were millions of potential customers receiving a free introduction to the magazine, followed by an extraordinary conversion into a paid audience.
Nintendo’s customer database itself continued growing and eventually exceeded ten million names, according to Tilden. The company guarded that information closely, and for a period even handled magazine mailing operations internally.
Nintendo Power had become much more than an experiment.
Maps Made With Scissors and Knives
The most impressive pages in early Nintendo Power were sometimes created with techniques that now seem almost impossible for a modern digital publication.
The magazine became famous for maps. Entire stages could be reconstructed across pages, allowing readers to study areas of The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, platformers, role-playing games, and other complicated releases away from the television.
Producing those maps in the 1980s was painstaking.
Tilden remembered that capturing a scrolling game environment was difficult because editors could not simply produce convenient digital screenshots from any point in a game. Phillips described equipment at Work House that connected to a game system and produced tiny color images. Workers trimmed those images with X-Acto knives and physically assembled them onto larger boards.
A sprawling map could therefore consist of many small pieces painstakingly joined together.
Accuracy mattered. If two pieces were attached incorrectly, the magazine could instruct hundreds of thousands of players to travel somewhere that did not exist. Phillips remembered long sessions checking screen captures, items, colors, and connections before the pages went to press.
Tilden later argued that these maps, rather than breaking news, were one of the reasons Nintendo Power became so useful. News would eventually migrate easily to the internet. A carefully constructed visual guide that helped a child finally escape a maze or finish a game offered something deeper.
For readers sitting on the floor in front of a television with a controller beside an open magazine, those pages functioned almost like a second screen decades before second screens became normal.
Classified Information
Nintendo Power understood that video game secrets were powerful social currency.
“Classified Information” presented codes, tricks, passwords, and hidden features with the visual language of confidential files. Tilden remembered deliberately giving the feature the appearance of secret material, turning ordinary game tips into information readers felt they had been allowed to discover.
Other departments served similar purposes. “Counselors’ Corner” could answer difficult gameplay questions. “Video Shorts” offered shorter assessments of games. Player polls let readers participate in the magazine while giving Nintendo valuable information about what its audience liked.
Even the Howard & Nester comic could teach.
Howard Phillips, Nintendo’s highly visible “Game Master,” appeared alongside the fictional Nester in strips that mixed humor with gameplay advice. Phillips was not merely a mascot invented for the magazine. He was deeply involved with Nintendo’s internal evaluation of games and with ensuring that information printed in Nintendo Power was correct.
The magazine consequently developed a personality that corporate catalogs rarely possess. Nintendo was not simply a logo in the corner of the page. It had counselors, editors, artists, fictional characters, letter writers, contest winners, and a recognizable voice.
Marketing, but Not Quite an Advertisement
There was always a contradiction at the center of Nintendo Power.
Nintendo published a magazine about Nintendo products.
That made complete editorial independence impossible in the traditional journalistic sense. The magazine existed partly because Nintendo wanted consumers to remain enthusiastic about Nintendo systems and software.
Yet the people who produced it resisted the idea that coverage was assigned blindly.
Tilden openly described the magazine as a marketing vehicle, but said its mission was to improve consumer satisfaction and protect the long-term health of video games as a category. Phillips had developed an internal game evaluation system in which Nintendo employees, Game Counselors, and eventually young players scored upcoming releases. Those evaluations helped feed the magazine’s “Power Meter.”
Tilden recalled that games with stronger evaluations could receive greater coverage, while publishers could not automatically obtain a cover merely because they wanted one. Some licensed games received less attention despite pressure from companies hoping for promotion.
That system did not make Nintendo Power independent journalism. Nintendo still controlled the publication, had early access to licensed games, and benefited financially whenever readers became excited about a new release.
What it did create was a peculiar relationship between promotion and service. Nintendo wanted to sell games, but it also understood that recommending weak games too aggressively could damage the reader’s trust in both the magazine and the hardware.
The publication’s long-term value depended on readers believing that opening it would actually help them play.
Becoming a Monthly Ritual
Nintendo Power originally appeared every two months. The earliest issues preserve that bimonthly rhythm, with Volume 1 dated July/August 1988 and subsequent issues following the same pattern.
As the NES expanded and the amount of available software increased, that schedule became harder to maintain. By 1990 the publication was moving toward monthly issues, and by the opening of 1991 readers could expect a new Nintendo Power every month.
That change transformed the magazine into a regular part of Nintendo culture.
Each new issue brought another cover game, another collection of strategies, reader correspondence, contests, scores, previews, and secrets. For subscribers, Nintendo had effectively placed a recurring advertisement, strategy guide, catalog, and fan community directly into the family mailbox.
The timing was ideal. The NES had become a cultural phenomenon, while competitors and third-party publishers were filling stores with new games. Soon the Super Nintendo would add another generation of software demanding explanation and promotion.
The magazine was positioned to accompany its readers from one Nintendo system to the next.
Teaching Players to Try Something New
One of the magazine’s less obvious roles was teaching American players how to understand kinds of games that had not yet become mainstream in the United States.
Role-playing games were a major example.
Tilden later recalled Nintendo’s concern that enormously successful Japanese franchises such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy had not yet created comparable audiences in America. These games moved more slowly than action titles and depended heavily on statistics, menus, equipment, exploration, and systems that could be unfamiliar to players raised primarily on arcade-style games.
Nintendo used Nintendo Power as part of the solution.
The company famously offered Dragon Warrior as a subscription promotion, placing the game into more homes while providing players with information that could help them understand it. Final Fantasy received sustained magazine coverage and promotional support as Nintendo attempted to convince American audiences that role-playing games were worth learning.
The effort did not instantly transform every subscriber into an RPG player, but it demonstrated what made Nintendo Power different from a normal advertisement. The magazine had enough room to teach.
A television commercial might make a game look exciting for thirty seconds. A magazine could explain how that game worked across many pages, provide maps, introduce characters, show equipment, reveal strategies, and return to the subject in later issues.
Nintendo was not merely selling a cartridge. It was trying to create the knowledge necessary for a new genre to find an audience.
From NES to Super NES
The Super Nintendo era gave Nintendo Power an even larger canvas.
More detailed graphics produced increasingly elaborate screenshots and artwork. Games such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and countless others were particularly suited to the magazine’s strategy-heavy format.
Nintendo also used its enormous direct-mail network for promotions beyond the magazine itself. Tilden remembered sending promotional videotapes to the Nintendo Power mailing list, most famously to demonstrate Donkey Kong Country. Nintendo wanted players to see the unusual pre-rendered graphics rather than merely read about them.
The company could therefore use the magazine and its subscriber database as a direct line into American homes.
By then, the relationship went both ways. Players were not simply receiving information from Nintendo. Reader polls, contest entries, letters, game evaluations, and other responses returned information to the company.
Nintendo Power had become both a publication and a consumer network.
A Community Before the Internet
It is easy to look at an old copy of Nintendo Power today and see information that can now be found online within seconds.
That misses much of what the magazine represented when it was new.
Before widespread household internet access, video game communities were often local. Children traded secrets at school, compared games at friends’ houses, called hotlines, borrowed magazines, or discovered tricks from siblings. Unless someone attended a tournament or convention, there were limited opportunities to see the larger culture surrounding the games.
Nintendo Power connected those isolated groups.
Reader letters showed that other people cared about the same games. High-score pages offered targets from players a subscriber would never meet. Coverage of events and competitions suggested that gaming existed beyond the living room. Polls gave readers a sense that their preferences mattered. Contests turned games into experiences larger than cartridges.
When the magazine closed, Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland remembered precisely that aspect of it. Looking back on his own childhood readership, he argued that Nintendo Power had provided a connection to a wider gaming world before the internet made such connections routine.
The information was useful, but the feeling that millions of other people were playing alongside you may have been just as important.
Nintendo 64, GameCube, and a Changing World
Nintendo Power survived the transition from two-dimensional games to the Nintendo 64, then continued into the GameCube and Game Boy Advance years. Its subject matter evolved with Nintendo hardware, but the world around the magazine was changing even faster.
The internet attacked one of print gaming’s fundamental limitations: time.
A monthly magazine could spend weeks being written, designed, printed, shipped, and delivered. A website could report an announcement almost immediately. Walkthroughs could be updated. Players could ask one another questions directly. Message boards, fan sites, search engines, and eventually video platforms made the information once collected inside strategy magazines available continuously.
Tilden later acknowledged that news had never really been Nintendo Power’s greatest strength. Gameplay had been. The maps and guides were the features that gave the magazine its durability.
Even that advantage gradually narrowed. Online walkthroughs became more sophisticated. Fan-created maps spread freely. Video guides could demonstrate exactly how to perform a difficult action instead of describing it on a printed page.
The magazine still had an audience, but it was no longer the only doorway into Nintendo’s world.
Future US Takes Over
A major institutional change arrived in 2007.
For nearly two decades, Nintendo of America had produced Nintendo Power itself. In September 2007, Nintendo and Future US announced that Future would assume publication of the magazine.
The companies described Volume 222, the December 2007 edition, as the first full issue produced under the new arrangement. A contemporary press release placed its initial circulation at 300,000 copies and confirmed that subscribers would continue receiving the magazine monthly.
The transition is also documented directly in surviving subscriber material. The Video Game History Foundation preserves a letter included with Volume 222 in which new editor-in-chief Chris Slate informed readers that Future US had taken over publishing responsibility.
It was a significant change. Nintendo Power remained an officially licensed Nintendo publication, but the magazine that had started inside Nintendo of America now belonged operationally to a company specializing in magazines.
For readers, the logo survived. Behind it, an era had ended.
The Last Years of Print
Future US carried Nintendo Power through the Wii and Nintendo DS boom and into the first months of the Wii U era.
Yet the economics of print magazines continued deteriorating.
By 2012 gamers could receive Nintendo announcements directly from Nintendo itself, read reviews from countless publications, discuss games instantly through social media, watch trailers online, stream gameplay, consult enormous collaborative databases, and find complete video walkthroughs without leaving a computer or phone.
The monthly information cycle that had made Nintendo Power so valuable in 1988 belonged to another technological world.
In August 2012 reports emerged that publication would end. Nintendo soon confirmed the decision publicly. Its statement said Future US would end production with the December 2012 issue and that Nintendo Power would not move to another publisher.
Contemporary reporting placed the magazine’s total monthly readership around 475,000, still a substantial audience but far removed from the enormous reach associated with its early years. The magazine had survived competitors, hardware generations, and dramatic shifts in the video game industry. It could not escape the transformation of the media environment itself.
Volume 285
The final issue arrived in December 2012.
Volume 285 deliberately looked backward.
Its cover paid tribute to Volume 1, visually returning to the Mario imagery that had greeted readers in the summer of 1988. Where the first issue had promoted the strange American version of Super Mario Bros. 2, the final cover placed contemporary Mario imagery into a composition designed to make longtime readers recognize the connection immediately.
Inside, the magazine celebrated its own history. The ending was not treated like an ordinary cancellation followed by an empty final page. The staff knew readers had spent years, and in some cases most of their lives, with the publication.
A surviving subscriber letter carried the message plainly in its title: “Final Issue, Thank You & Farewell!”
The Video Game History Foundation preserves both Volume 285 and that accompanying letter. Its archive records the final magazine as a Future US publication licensed by Nintendo of America, closing the main collection at 285 issues.
The company that had once mailed millions of free copies into American homes was finally saying goodbye to the readers who remained.
What Nintendo Power Left Behind
Nintendo Power was always an unusual publication.
It was journalism and marketing, although never fully one or the other. It reviewed games while being owned or licensed by the company whose machines those games supported. It taught players how to defeat difficult bosses while simultaneously making them want the next cartridge. It turned customer service into entertainment and product promotion into something readers genuinely treasured.
That combination could only have emerged from a particular moment in video game history.
The Nintendo Entertainment System arrived in an American market still recovering from the collapse of the earlier console business. Nintendo believed consumer confidence mattered enormously. Games were expensive, information was scarce, and finishing them often required knowledge that was difficult to find.
Nintendo Power filled that gap.
Its importance was not simply that it told people which games existed. Players could see games on store shelves. Television commercials could do that job.
The magazine taught them how to participate.
It showed maps of worlds they had not yet explored. It revealed secrets hidden behind walls. It demonstrated that other children cared about high scores and strange tricks just as much as they did. It introduced unfamiliar genres, transformed Nintendo employees into recognizable personalities, and turned each mailbox delivery into another glimpse of what might be waiting inside the next cartridge.
Today the entire 285-issue main run can be studied as a historical archive. Those pages document not only Nintendo’s changing hardware and games, but the changing relationship between video game companies and the people who played their products. The collection begins in a world where Nintendo mailed printed information because players had almost nowhere else to find it and ends in a world where online information had become effectively limitless.
That transformation is what makes Nintendo Power historically important.
For twenty-four years, from a clay Mario holding a turnip to a final cover designed to remember him, the magazine recorded the rise of Nintendo in America while helping create the culture growing around it.
Long before a walkthrough was a search away, millions of players learned that when a game became impossible, there might still be an answer waiting in the mailbox.
Sources & Further Reading
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 1, July/August 1988. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/digital_objects/12189
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vols. 1–285, 1988–2012. Nintendo Power Collection. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/8
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Fun Club News. 1987–1988. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/15382
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Fun Club News. Vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 1987. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/15383
Video Game History Foundation. “Nintendo Newsletters Collection.” Game History Library. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/73
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 13, July 1990. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/digital_objects/12201
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 20, January 1991. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/digital_objects/12208
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 28, September 1991. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1317
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 31, December 1991. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1320
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 78, November 1995. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1367
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 99, August 1997. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1388
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 110, July 1998. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/1399
Nintendo of America and Future US. “Nintendo and Future US Team to Publish Nintendo Power Magazine.” Press release, September 19, 2007. Reproduced by Nintendo World Report. https://nintendoworldreport.com/pr/14438/future-us-to-publish-nintendo-power
Slate, Chris. Letter to Nintendo Power subscribers announcing Future US’s assumption of publishing responsibilities. December 2007. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/22846
Future US. Nintendo Power. Vol. 222, December 2007. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/resources/8/collection_organization
Future US. 20 Years of Nintendo Power. 2009. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/2416
Future US. Nintendo Power. Vol. 285, December 2012. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/digital_objects/12473
Future US. “Final Issue, Thank You & Farewell!” Letter to Nintendo Power subscribers, December 2012. Video Game History Foundation, Game History Library. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/14710
Cifaldi, Frank. “Nintendo Power: Remembering America’s Longest-Lasting Game Magazine.” Game Developer, December 11, 2012. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/nintendo-power-remembering-america-s-longest-lasting-game-magazine
Lewin, Kelsey. “Watch the Nintendo Power Reunion!” Video Game History Foundation, March 16, 2022. https://gamehistory.org/watch-nintendo-power-reunion/
Kunimune, Robin. “Ep. 75: Nintendo Power Reunion.” Video Game History Foundation, March 16, 2022. https://gamehistory.org/ep-75-nintendo-power-reunion/
Video Game History Foundation. “A Fireside Chat with Gail Tilden.” The Video Game History Hour. https://gamehistory.org/episode-126-a-fireside-chat-with-gail-tilden/
Video Game History Foundation. “The Making of Nintendo Power Magazine.” Accessed October 13, 2026. https://gamehistory.org/the-making-of-nintendo-power-magazine/
Nintendo Life. “Ninterview: Howard ‘GameMaster’ Phillips.” October 2012. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/10/ninterview_howard_gamemaster_phillips
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Nieborg, David B., and Maxwell Foxman. Mainstreaming and Game Journalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546287/mainstreaming-and-game-journalism/
Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. https://books.google.com/books/about/Cheating.html?id=XbcNAUxUajAC
Sheff, David. Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World. New York: Random House, 1993. https://books.google.com/books?id=b_N5FzzD3hsC
Ryan, Jeff. Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011. https://books.google.com/books?id=9_JvDwAAQBAJ
Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ultimate_History_of_Video_Games_Volu.html?id=C2MH05ogU9oC
Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming. New York: Crown, 2021. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ultimate_History_of_Video_Games_Volu.html?id=UosOEAAAQBAJ
Harris, Blake J. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation. New York: It Books, 2014. https://books.google.com/books/about/Console_Wars.html?id=kCSSAgAAQBAJ
Orland, Kyle. “Nintendo Power’s Last Issue Coming in December.” Ars Technica, August 22, 2012. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/08/source-nintendo-power-magazine-to-cease-publication/
GameSpot. “Nintendo Power Shutting Down.” August 2012. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-power-shutting-down/1100-6392330/
Nintendo World Report. “Nintendo of America Comments on Nintendo Power’s Closure.” August 2012. https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/31402/nintendo-of-america-comments-on-nintendo-powers-closure
GameSpot. “Final Issue of Nintendo Power Pays Homage to Origin.” December 2012. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/final-issue-of-nintendo-power-pays-homage-to-origin/1100-6400841/
Knox, Kelly. “Game Over for Nintendo Power.” Wired, December 21, 2012. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/nintendo-power-2/
Machkovech, Sam. “Nintendo Pulls Classic Nintendo Power Magazine Collection from Internet Archive.” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-nintendo-power-collection-online/
Game Informer. “Inside the Nintendo Power Hotline.” February 22, 2022. https://gameinformer.com/2022/02/22/inside-the-nintendo-power-hotline
Indiana University Libraries. “Video Game Periodical Collection.” Accessed October 13, 2026. https://guides.libraries.indiana.edu/c.php?g=1227742&p=9696700
Syracuse University Libraries. “Games Research in the Libraries’ Collections and Beyond.” Accessed October 13, 2026. https://library.syracuse.edu/blog/games-research-in-the-libraries-collections-and-beyond/
Hit Save! “Nintendo Power.” Hit Save! Archive. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://archive.hitsave.org/nintendo-power