Nintendo Magazine System (Australia)

~ the obituary ~

Issue one appeared in April 1993 with Super Mario Land 2 on the cover, 68 pages, published in Australia by Trielle Corporation under license from the British title of the same name. The United Kingdom edition had launched six months earlier and would go on to change its name four times over twenty-two years. The Australian one never changed its name once.

It was the officially endorsed Nintendo magazine for the market, and the cover strapline said so outright: Australia's only official Nintendo magazine. In practice the endorsement meant press materials and early cartridges, and an expectation of enthusiasm. It was not especially obedient about the enthusiastic part. Reviews of badly made games regularly came back with scores in the low thirties out of a hundred, which is a number a magazine only prints when it is not worried about who is reading.

Catalyst Publishing took the title over starting with issue 34 in January 1996 and kept the issue numbering unbroken, so the magazine ran as one continuous serial across the change of owner. It carried material well outside its remit as it went on, including explainers on the idea of virtual reality and rankings of the highest-grossing coin-operated arcade machines, neither of which had anything to do with a Nintendo console.

The last issue was number 89, dated August 2000, by then 100 pages at $6.95 with Lara Croft on the cover, Tomb Raider having reached the Game Boy Color that year. Nothing in it was billed as a farewell. The magazine had been running for seven years and four months, and it stopped on an issue that looked like any other.

~ the case file ~

~ scores in the low thirties ~

The scoring says something about who was reading. A magazine with an official license and a captive audience of children can review everything at 75 percent and keep its distribution regardless. Printing a 31 assumes the opposite: readers who were going to spend real money on the recommendation and come back angry if it was wrong.

That was the normal standard for games print in the 1990s, and the web ended it, as scores drifted upward and the bottom of the scale quietly stopped being used at all. In 1996 the low thirties were an ordinary part of the range. A decade later a score under 50 had become an event that got written about on its own.

~ the eight-year gap ~

When issue 89 went out in August 2000 the N64 was near the end of its run and the GameCube was still more than a year off. Nintendo did not license a replacement. Australia and New Zealand went without an officially endorsed Nintendo magazine through the entire GameCube era and on past the DS launch.

Australian games print is a part of this era I have no memory of whatsoever, and the reason is simple arithmetic: the magazine sat in Australian newsagents, in a market of about nineteen million people, with no export edition. The Turkish equivalent did not exist either. What reached me were the games, which traveled without their press.

The replacement was announced in November 2008, and the first issue of Official Nintendo Magazine for Australia and New Zealand came out on 15 December 2008 under Future. That one closed in December 2013. The regional license has been unused since.

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