Nintendo la Rivista Ufficiale

» see nintendorivistaufficiale.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The first issue was cover-dated June 2002, timed to the GameCube arriving in Europe, and it ran monthly for eleven years with a December Natale issue bolted on each year until 2009. The page size changed twice, from a 27 by 30 centimeter format down to something that fit a normal rack, a change that only ever gets written down in a magazine's own notes about itself. It had a predecessor, Official Nintendo Magazine from Xenia Edizioni, which had run from November 1998 and stopped as this one started.

What it actually was, structurally, was a license. Nintendo Italia did not publish it; an Italian magazine house did, under agreement, with Nintendo's name and approval on the cover. That arrangement is why the masthead kept changing while the magazine did not. It is the same reason the magazine could die with Nintendo still selling consoles in the same country, uninterrupted.

Official Nintendo magazines existed country by country, each one a separate deal between Nintendo's local operation and a local publisher, which means the map of where they existed is a map of where Nintendo had an office rather than where the games were popular. I never saw one in Turkish. In 2002 I was about to start university and buying no magazines in any language, so an Italian monthly about the GameCube was never in front of me to ignore.

~ the dossier ~

~ the masthead kept changing ~

Issues 1 to 6 came out under Future Media Italy. Issues 7 to 40 say Future Games, and 41 to 61 just say Future. From issue 62 in February 2007 all the way to the end it was Sprea. Three of those four names are the same house renaming itself, so the real publisher history is one handover, and it landed in early 2007.

The editors-in-chief ran in order from Claudio Tradardi to Mattia Ravanelli, with Marco Auletta covering on an interim basis before Ugo Laviano took the chair from issue 83. There were spin-offs as well: Game Boy Advance la Rivista Ufficiale ran five issues between 2003 and 2005, and was replaced by a Nintendo DS equivalent when the handheld changed. The only circulation number anyone published was 9,000 copies, in December 2011, which is a modest figure for a national official magazine. It comes from the magazine's own data, and no independent audit ever repeated it.

~ the notice that never came down ~

Issue 142 went on sale in the first days of July 2013 with Super Mario 3D World on the cover and a Wind Waker HD poster inside, priced at 6.90 euro instead of the usual 5.90. The historic editorial team left with it. Akiba Gamers reported the departure on 3 July and said Nintendo had changed strategy for reasons unknown to them, which is roughly where Italian readers were left for several weeks.

Nintendo Italia's own page said that issue 142 was the last one published by Sprea Editori, that it was in contact with other publishers with the aim of getting the magazine back on newsstands, and that it hoped to manage this by the end of July. That page still carries exactly those words today, having migrated from nintendo.it onto nintendo.com without anyone editing the interim text out. The actual ending came separately and read differently: given the difficult situation in publishing, they had not managed to find a workable alternative to continue publication.

~ what else was closing ~

This was the second official Nintendo magazine to close within a year. Nintendo Power's last issue in the United States was dated December 2012, and the United Kingdom's Official Nintendo Magazine would follow in October 2014. The Italian one fell in the middle of that sequence, and the replacement offered to its readers was a list of channels, the Facebook page and Nintendo Direct among them. The magazine's own domain, nintendorivistaufficiale.it, kept being archived until 2018 and no longer resolves at all.

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