Revista Oficial Nintendo

~ the obituary ~

An official magazine is a licensing arrangement before it is a magazine, and Nintendo's licensing map never had a line on it for Turkey. Spain got one in December 1992, when Hobby Press launched Nintendo Acción to tell Spanish readers what the company was releasing and when. It was monthly, it was in Spanish, and for twenty six years it carried whatever Nintendo wanted Spanish players to know.

Hobby Press was swallowed by the German publisher Axel Springer in 1998 and the magazine carried on as before. Juan Carlos García directed it for more than twenty years, which in this business is most of a career spent on one title. Rubén Guzmán followed him, then Gustavo Acero at the end of 2016, and in the final stretch Sonia Herranz ran the newsroom as coordinator with a changed team under her.

With issue 229, in December 2011, Nintendo Acción became Revista Oficial Nintendo. The reason given was brand unification, meaning the licensor wanted its name on the cover rather than a title the Spanish staff had invented. Seven years and eighty seven issues later Axel Springer looked at what it was selling and stopped.

~ the case file ~

~ what an official magazine is for ~

Scores ran from one to four across graphics, multiplayer, length and fun, which is a narrow enough range that a bad game and a mediocre one land in the same place. Readers of licensed magazines understood the arrangement. You bought it to see what was coming and to read a preview written by somebody who had actually been shown the game. Criticism of the licensor was never the point of the transaction.

What that bought the reader was access. In January 2007, for the issue published on 15 December 2006, the magazine redesigned itself to match the new image Nintendo wanted around the Wii launch. The redesign was dated to the console, not to anything happening in the newsroom.

~ the magazine inside the magazine ~

Once Pokémon arrived, the magazine started bundling a Revista Pokémon supplement every month, covering the games and putting players in touch with each other, and ran it until the start of 2012. In January 2008 it tried something stranger: a second, shorter magazine bound into the back cover with its pages running the other way, about using a Nintendo console for something other than entertainment. That meant Wii Fit and the Touch Generations catalog, written for whoever was buying a console in 2008 having never owned one. It lasted until issue 221.

For years it was sold shrink-wrapped to a sheet of cardboard, then just shrink-wrapped, and finally with neither, which was presented as an environmental decision and was also one less thing to pay for.

~ the arithmetic at the end ~

Issue 316 reached Spanish newsstands from 17 December 2018 with a January 2019 cover date, three days after the closure was confirmed. The magazine had never existed anywhere except on paper, so there was no site to leave running and no digital edition to keep selling.

Axel Springer kept two games magazines in Spain afterward: Hobby Consolas at around 18,500 copies and Retro Gamer at around 11,000. A magazine about machines Nintendo was still selling had been outlived by one about machines nobody makes anymore.

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