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Spouting Thomas's avatar

Good finds! Not much I'm familiar with here.

Don't recall these score sheets despite being part of the Nintendo Fun Club -- maybe I saw them but I just dismissed it as busywork. But my favorite part is the innocence of a world in which a kid says, "I made it to 6-1 in Super Mario Bros! Guys, I'm taking a photo and mailing this one in!"

Though I was never so innocent; a friend has a photo of himself beating SMB at like age 5 or 6. He kept up with the game into high school too, was always crazy good at it. So yeah, I never imagined that I was a gaming wizard.

Meanwhile the "Discovery Log" idea is a funny anecdote, but surely we were all committing that stuff to memory! The more meaningful the powerup, the more deeply it was seared into our brains.

Long, long ago, I had a girlfriend that really liked SMB but was so bad at it. She really struggled with managing Mario's running. So she had to very consciously tell herself that Mario needed to run for this part, then look down at the control pad to find the B-button, hold it, and then start running. And she played the game a LOT too, I want to be clear. I'm describing her after like 20 hours of practice trying to get better at it.

Anyway, she's the user I imagine for the Discovery Log.

As for Game & Watch, I had never heard of it until the Smash Bros. character was revealed. I'm really surprised that one released this late, and yet we still had no awareness of it. I wonder how widely it was marketed, how much shelf space was given to it at how many stores.

I was familiar with the Sega Master System just from seeing it in stores. I recall Toys R' Us having an unusually large amount of shelf space dedicated to SMS games circa 1988, so it entered my consciousness even though I never knew anyone who owned one. Yet Game & Watch never entered my consciousness the same way.

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John Murphy's avatar

I had a few Nintendo Power issues and I called into the hotline one time. I never really interacted with Nintendo any other way outside of the video games themselves. But I find all of this stuff super fascinating. I love reading about the history of video game companies.

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