Nintendo Gamer

» see nintendo-gamer.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Britain had an unofficial Nintendo magazine for most of the twenty years between 1992 and 2012, and it renamed itself every time Nintendo changed its hardware. Super Play covered the SNES until 1996, then N64 Magazine took over in 1997 and became NGC Magazine for the GameCube era. NGC stopped in 2006 and NGamer started that July, with the Wii five months away from European shops and nobody yet certain the thing would work.

The last rename came on 5 January 2012, at issue 71. NGamer became Nintendo Gamer and was reformatted at the same time, which is usually a publisher's way of giving a title one more chance in front of the people who audit circulation.

It got eight months. On 30 August 2012 Future announced the closure on the same day the final issue came off the press, and issue 80 went on sale the following week.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ 7,745 ~

That was the average circulation across 2011, the last full year the magazine was audited. It is a small number by any measure, and smaller still for a Future title in Bath competing with an official magazine that had Nintendo's own name on the masthead.

Being unofficial was the entire point of the thing. Super Play had made its reputation on import coverage and on taking Japanese games seriously years before the UK trade did, and the independent line survived every rename down to the end. The official magazine could not have run some of those pages.

~ what Future said ~

Publisher Lee Nutter said the decision to close the magazine had been taken after weighing it up, and placed it inside Future's ongoing strategy to drive digital growth across its brands. He asked people to buy the final issue on 6 September. The website, he said, would continue as excitement built ahead of Nintendo's Wii U launch.

The Wii U launched that November and sold 13.5 million units across its whole life, the worst total of any Nintendo home console. Official Nintendo Magazine, the licensed one, covered all of it and lasted until November 2014.

~ the addresses ~

The site that was going to carry on, nintendo-gamer.net, no longer resolves at all. There is no DNS record left to answer with.

The older address, ngamer.co.uk, does still respond. It currently serves a mobile gambling signup page advertising ten thousand rupiah deposits through QRIS, the Indonesian QR payment standard. Lapsed magazine domains get bought by somebody, and what they get used for afterward is rarely about magazines.

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