"The Nintendo Player’s Guide" by Nintendo of America, Inc. (1987)

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

-Rumi

“Like” if you remember Nintendo Power. Yeah the magazine.

Of course you do. We thirty-somethings represent a sizable chunk of the gaming population, evidently. How much? Look, it’s whatever. We’re not here to talk about demographics.

An anecdote: so I was recently tidying up what I’m calling my Retro Room. It doubles as an office-slash-storage room. I do most of my writing in there (here). I’ve begun to put up Pink Floyd and Nintendo posters, paintings I’ve finished on the walls. It’s where I relax as I listen to some records. I’ve set up my entire console collection and a TV in there (here). Unfortunately, it got pretty messy after going through old boxes and digging out piles of forgotten cords, power adapters, surge protectors, HDMI, coax, and A/V cables, cartridges, and those little doodads you put in the insides of cabinets to hold up the shelving.

All that archaeology paid off, though, because I came across this:

I don’t recall ever having laid eyes on it before and apparently it was my wife’s from when she was a child and a hardcore NES player. The crusted tome was protected by a plastic sleeve but it has clearly seen some wear and tear. This wonderful artifact will now be preserved in my Retro Room, where it belongs, instead of forgotten in a cardboard box in my garage.

This is the very first in a series of strategy guides which Nintendo would eventually publish based on information printed in Nintendo Power magazine. Tidbits, hints, secrets, splash pages covered in maps for various platforming stages, and dossiers on hazardous enemies appeared in these guides as a compendium knowledge printed separately in Nintendo Power. However, The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide, being the first in the series and being printed a year before Nintendo Power’s first issue, featured all new information at the time.

The Guide boasted that it covers 90 games for “your N.E.S.”. Isn’t that cute? They still spelled it with the periods. Of course, 90 games isn’t a lot, considering the system eventually had 716 officially licensed games, 679 of which were released in North America, but it’s a start. Remember, this was printed in 1987. The system had only been out in North America for about two years, and in Japan for about four.
The Guide does cover a wealth of titles, many of which are some of the best on the system.

The Guide divides the games up by color-coded category: the Adventure Series, Programmable Series, Action Series, Arcade Series, Sports Series, Robot Series, Light-Gun Series, and Educational Series. Further categorization comes in the form of “In-Depth Reviews” and “Game Guides”. The former focuses on a single game across several pages, giving you screenshots, tips on secrets, characters and items, info on how to play, story, map layouts, and so on. The latter guides offer up a mere two paragraphs per game which read as if they’re more marketing than actual walkthroughs or reviews.

The tagline on the cover “A complete review of over 90 games for your N.E.S.” isn’t really accurate, then. But hey. It got somebody to buy this book and it launched a series of such books.

I was initially very excited to settle in and read all the “reviews” for the games, but they are less critique and more walkthrough. The guides in the are light and superficial. This is official literature after all, so I shouldn’t have expected it to represent material that actually reviewed, summarized, and criticized Nintendo’s games. The “in-depth” reviews tend to be very vague, as well, despite all the printed space given up for them, easily two-thirds of the book.

They’ll tell you about a game’s story, but not much more than was printed in the game’s manual. They’ll mention the final boss of a game but not give any concrete information on how to beat him/her (trust me, I checked Mike Tyson right away). They’ll feature blurbs on secrets but these are some of the most commonly known secrets. Even the images of sprites are layered with fuzzy scanlines.

Of course, The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide was at its most valuable upon release. Three decades later, it’s not much of a resource and it can’t compare to the exhaustive data you can find on any subject about nearly any game on the internet. Printed strategy guides are a thing of the past and this book is a relic, an interesting novelty.

It could guide you through an NES game, decently, but if you’ve been playing NES games throughout the years, you likely have more info memorized than this book has written down. It’s not completely without value, as the maps for the Zeldas and the info on the boxers before Tyson could get you through the games, but it might just be easier to pull out your phone. I don’t exactly want to handle this book without some latex gloves on. It’s ancient.

At least it doesn’t try to get me to log into PlayOnline!

As a source of nostalgia and a window backward into history, filling in the gaps of knowledge for games we might’ve never had the manuals for, The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide is a veritable treasure trove. It could serve to introduce new and younger players to the early portions of the NES library. For wizened retro gamers, it’s something that’d be cool to own but there’s not much practical value left in it, at least not in my book.

Wanna take a look through the Guide yourself? Here’s an archived copy!

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.