In the '80s, Nintendo of America Loved Connecting With Gamers
Shandon Youngclaus Sends His Regards
(This is Part 2. Check out Part 1 below)
The Nintendo Fun Club News Vol. 3 has lots of information on new NES games circa the fall of 1987. Games like Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, Metroid, and Rad Racer.
But you know what this issue also has? A surprising and significant amount of consideration towards both Nintendo employees like the gaming counselors and the players.
I don’t want to spoil what Vol. 3 has to offer. But needless to say, Nintendo of America really cared about creating and maintaining longtime brand loyalty in the late 1980s. Whether their efforts were purely for financial gain or not, I don’t know. But as I peruse through these ancient texts, I get the sense that Howard Philips enjoyed fostering a sense of community between the players and Nintendo themselves.
Shame that this sort of camraderie between gamers and companies has all but fallen by the wayside in our current, jaded age.
In lieu of modern civility, let’s appreciate the past. Onto the newsletter!
Look at these High Score/Ganon-beating Legends!
Shandon Youngclaus might be the greatest (possibly fake) name I’ve ever seen.
Also, Nintendo, I know it’s 1987 and we were all more innocent then, but never use the phrase “master Ganon beater” in your newsletter ever again.
Ah, the halcyon days of local video game clubs. The fact that Nintendo made an actual Fun Club Kit is pretty amazing… or did they? I’ve scoured the web to see what one of these kits might look like, but alas, not even eBay has one for sale.
If you’ve seen a Fun Club Kit in person or know where I might find information about one, please hit me up in the comments!
Look at these upstanding young men, playing all the latest, hottest NES titles and helping out the youth of tomorrow with Metroid, Kid Icarus and the rest. Well done, gents. Well done.
More Rad Racer devotion, including discussion about the included 3-D glasses that, if I’m not mistaken, don’t work very well.
Interesting note: in the Capcom ad, the game The Speed Rumbler was never brought to the NES or Famicom.
We’ve seen most of this swag before in previous Nintendo Fun Club volumes. All except for the Nintendo Fun Club Binder, which is one of the items included in the Fun Club Kit.
Once again, I couldn’t find one on eBay, but I did find this link where someone generously posted screenshots of all the pages in the Fun Club binder. Definitely worth a look!
The NES Advantage is a fantastic arcade stick controller and is arguably the best NES controller, period. I’m also partial to the dog-bone iteration that came with the NES redesign in the early 90s, but given that so many NES games started their life in the arcade, the Advantage just feels so right with the console’s numerous arcade ports.
I am super excited to see the pictures of the Halloween contest in the next issue.
Kudos to Nintendo of America (and Howard Philips in particular) to cultivating a sense of community for the burgeoning NES. Between the Fun Club itself, Howard Philips as a down-to-earth spokesperson, all the paraphernalia like the Scorepads, and the contests, the Nintendo of the late 1980s arguably did more to keep gamers excited about the company than they do today.
You can keep Star Voyager and Winter Games, but I’ll take that free 3-D Worldrunner poster from you…
Another crazy gaming contest, this time by Konami. I can’t imagine being one of the top four scorers on Top Gun.
Then again… did this contest ever really happen? The ad says “keep your eyes peeled for details,” but a thorough internet search yields no results on the supposed “Top Gun Shoot Out.” Not even a mention on Reddit or some ancient gaming forum.
Guess I’ll continue to keep my eyes peeled in future issues.
And with that, the Fun Club News Vol. 3 is complete. I hope you all found this as morbidly fascinating as I did. Until next time!
I can take the point about caring about players. I think to some degree that's just a function of being part of a smaller and relatively outcast community, back when the hobby was more niche, ESPECIALLY among adults. Also in gaming's early days, a lot of the execs were game devs themselves (who are necessarily gamers). They were part of that community and saw themselves in the kids they were producing games for. But later on you had the rise of the non-gamer CEO.
I'm inclined to think this might have been less true in Japan (though I don't really know), but it was very apparent in the West, especially in PC gaming. Nearly all of the most beloved PC gaming companies of the 80s/90s were founded by game devs and still largely run by them at the time they were putting out their key hits of that era. Microprose, Origin, id, Blizzard, Westwood, Sierra. Only exception I can think of is LucasArts, founded by George Lucas as a subsidiary of LucasFilm.
To my knowledge the guy who set the trend of the non-gamer CEO is the now-disgraced Bobby Kotick of Activision. But Activision was a joke in the 90s; Kotick turned it into a financially successful but gamer-hated juggernaut. EA founder Trip Hawkins was also a gamer, but then in the 90s its leadership passed to non-gamers forever onward, and early EA was a very different creature from the, again, financially successful but hated company of today.