The NES was the premier gaming console when I was growing up, and Nintendo Power was the outlet for all of our interest in games for years.
I don’t think it ever crossed anyone’s mind how strange it was that the only source of information was directly from the console maker who also created each issue of the magazine up until 2007 when Future took over.
Not that there weren’t other gaming magazines, but this was pretty much it for many people.
It’s an interesting correlation to today’s in-house corporate media reaching out to their communities. Nintendo’s videos, Sony’s has their Playstation blog and podcast. Microsoft has their Major Nelson, whose podcast I listened to up until he started saying that HDMI wasn’t an improvement over component cables back when the 360 didn’t have an HDMI port.
Archive.org has been hosting incredible collections of random stuff for years. I just found a functioning version of one of my favorite Windows 3.1 games, WinTrek, that is emulated directly in your browser. They have now collected 145 scanned issues of Nintendo Power spanning from 1988 through 2002.
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