Do any of you have childhood memories of enjoying issues of Nintendo Power? You know, back when Nintendo still published them? Well, it appears that now you can relive those memories. Or even make new ones by reading issues you missed. All thanks to the power of the Internet Archive, along with one great uploader.
The Return of Nintendo Power?!
A user who goes by the name of Gumball has just uploaded all volumes of Nintendo Power into the Internet Archive. I’m not kidding about the “all volumes” part either. You can right now download all 285 issues of that venerable gaming magazine entirely for free. Either in .cbr format, a big zip file, or even as a Torrent file. All it will cost you is nearly 40 gigabytes of hard drive space. However, that’s a a small price to pay to relive some childhood memories. Or even if there’s this one Nintendo game that you just couldn’t beat, and you want a guide in a fun format. Whichever might be the case, a bit of hard drive space is worth it.
According to Kotaku (who first reported on this), the vast majority of this Nintendo Power collection comes from Retromags: another internet archive project that focuses on preserving old video game magazines. However, the remaining volumes were apparently provided by Gumball themself. Apparently, they’d been collecting old manuals and gaming magazines for a while now. They just so happened to have all the Nintendo Power volumes stuffed into a hard drive somewhere. After being unable to find some volumes for download, they then decided to share their whole collection with the world. You can read their entire thread on Reddit below:
[Y]eah ive been collecting manuals, and stuff for systems I grew up with and I wanted to complete them digitally for convenience and ease of use and when i was working on downloading every issue of nintendo power I was surprised when all I could find was scattered collections of maybe half of them. Retromags was a great resource. They have a lot of them.
So in my quest to find them all some awesome folks over at the r/DHexchange on reddit supplied the missing issues I couldn’t find. I figured since I had every single one now archived on my hard drive I might as well share them in one convenient place so anyone who might want to revisit these wonderful magazines can no longer worry about tracking them down. And it is a big piece of a lot of kids child hoods and gaming history so I think it’s important that they are available for everyone to read.
Gumball, we have no idea how long you’ve been holding onto this hard drive full of Nintendo Power for all these years. However, we Nintendo fans salute you for sharing this treasure with the world. A podcast just isn’t the same as the actual magazine.
Source: Internet Archive, Kotaku, Reddit
