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Game Players Nintendo Guide

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Game Players Nintendo Guide is the general term for the Nintendo-exclusive magazine produced by Signal Research (and later GP Publications) under multiple names from 1988 to 1993. It was the first console magazine of the NES generation to hit newsstands (Nintendo Power was subscription-only at the time), and it was Signal's most well-known magazine for most of its existence.

History

Signal (a company founded by Robert Lock, the former head of COMPUTE! magazine) got its start in 1988 with two separate titles: Game Player's Nintendo Buyer's Guide, and Game Player's Nintendo Strategy Guide.

The exact timeline of these publications is sketchy, as publishing dates generally do not appear in Signal magazines until late 1989. However, judging by advertisements and editorial coverage, it seems that Signal began with a one-off Buyer's Guide sometime in the early summer of 1988, then launched both Buyer's Guide and Strategy Guide as regular publications just a month or two later.

Until early 1989, Buyer's Guide and Strategy Guide were separate magazines, with Buyer's Guide coming out semiannually and Strategy Guide coming out quarterly for a total of six issues per year. (In practice, however, both magazines had a fairly haphazard schedule until mid-1989.) The former offered capsule reviews of hundreds of NES games, while the latter was filled with in-depth strategies. After three (?) Buyer's Guide issues, the two magazines were officially merged in the spring of 1989 and became a single magazine, Game Player's Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. (One more buyer's guide, the Game Player's Buyer's Guide to Nintendo, was published in October 1989, but this was counted as a regular issue of Strategy Guide.)

In terms of coverage, the magazine's early issues were very close to the Nintendo Power of the era, with heavy emphasis on strategy and very little critical coverage of games or industry news. Although it lacked Nintendo Power's flashy design, its screenshots were larger and it wasn't afraid to cover games right up to the final boss and ending -- which would be derided as spoiling the game today, but at the time was a valuable resource, since GameFAQs didn't exist and Nintendo Power shied away from spoiling final battles.

With the launch of the SNES in 1991, the magazine's name was edited down to Game Players Nintendo Guide (no apostrophe) and adopted fuller reviews, features, and numberical ratings for games. This was the start of the magazine's modernization process, which would ultimately result in one of the most well-remembered editorial teams in US game mags.

Game Players Nintendo Guide and Sega Guide merged after May 1993 to form Game Players, the second incarnation of the publisher's multiplatform game magazine.


Game Players Nintendo Guide Index

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Hol
1988 v1n1 v1n1 v1n2 v1n3 4 5
1989 v2n3 v2n4 v2n5 v2n6
1990 v3n1 v3n2 v3n3 v3n4 v3n5 v3n6 v3n7
1991 v4n1 v4n2 v4n3 v4n4 v4n5 v4n6 v4n7 v4n8 v4n9 v4n10 v4n11 v4n12 v4n13
1992 v5n1 v5n2 v5n3 v5n4 v5n5 v5n6 v5n7 v5n8 v5n9 v5n10 v5n11 v5n12 v5n13
1993 v6n1 v6n2 v6n3 v6n4 v6n5


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Information

    Title:Game Players Nintendo Guide
    Editor: Robert Lock, Leslie Mizell
    Categories: Nintendo consoles and games
    Frequency: Bimonthly (1988-90), monthly (1991-93)
    First Issue: Summer 1988
    Final Issue: May 1993 (?)
    Publisher: Signal Research (1989-92), GP Publications (1992-93)
    Country: United States

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