Official Nintendo Magazine

» see officialnintendomagazine.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I missed this one on two counts at once. Wrong country for a British newsstand, and wrong platform, since everything I played was PC-shaped. Counter-Strike in an internet cafe in Ankara, and a box at home I could open with a screwdriver. Nintendo was something I knew existed roughly the way you know a foreign sport exists.

The magazine started on 1 october 1992 as Nintendo Magazine System, published by EMAP under license, and then spent twenty-two years changing its name without much changing what it was. It went through Nintendo Magazine and Nintendo Official Magazine on the way, picking up a UK suffix at one point. Future plc took the license over and put out the first issue under the Official Nintendo Magazine name on 16 february 2006.

An officially licensed magazine is an odd object. It gets access nobody else gets, and it cannot call a game bad without a conversation happening somewhere above the editor's head. ONM handled that better than the format usually allows. It scored on a 0 to 100 percent scale and put its two highest marks on Ocarina of Time 3D and Skyward Sword, both at 98. It also got Shigeru Miyamoto to draw the cover of the hundredth issue in october 2013, which is a favor only an official magazine can call in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

For a British kid between roughly 1992 and 2008 this was infrastructure rather than reading material. Not journalism exactly and not marketing exactly, but the monthly object that told you what existed. There was no other reliable channel. Nintendo did not run direct video announcements yet and review sites were either untrusted or unbuilt. The shop stocked whatever the shop stocked.

There was an Australian and New Zealand edition too, launched in december 2008 and closed in december 2013. Regional print editions always go first. The licensing cost stays where it is while the newsstand under it keeps getting smaller.

~ the day it died ~

The ABC figures for the period ending december 2013 put print sales at 18,743, down 26.58 percent on the year before. A magazine losing a quarter of its buyers every year has about three years of arithmetic left in it, and everybody involved could do that arithmetic without help.

Nintendo UK and Future confirmed the closure in october 2014. Issue 114 went on sale on the 14th and was the last one. The website and forums stayed up for another four weeks and went dark on 11 november. No jobs were lost, which is unusual enough to record. Future moved the entire staff onto other titles in its portfolio, so what happened here was a title dying rather than a team being cut.

~ the inheritance ~

The forum moderators built a replacement called Super ONM and kept the readership together, which is the standard modern ending: the publication closes and the comment section declines to disperse. By then the magazine's actual job had already moved. Nintendo Direct took the announcements and YouTube took the previews. A player in 2014 had no reason left to wait a month to find anything out.

The thing that replaced it is the same thing that reached me in 1998. Once you are online you stop needing anyone to mail you information on paper, and that was as true in Ankara as it was in Britain. It just took another sixteen years to run out of people who had not noticed yet. Twenty-two years is a long life for a product whose entire premise was that news travels slowly.

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