I used to read Nintendo Power religiously. It was my magazine of choice for five years.
It began when I got the premiere issue (the one with the clay Super Mario cover) in the mail since I'd been a subscriber to their "Fun Club" newsletter. I couldn't believe how jam-packed the magazine was. It covered The Legend of Zelda, Double Dragon, Gauntlet, the upcoming Super Mario Bros. 2...all classics. It was fun, it was colorful, it had tips and maps and pictures all over the place. It was a wealth of gaming goodness for a young Nintendo fan.
Back then the issues only came every two months so it was agonizing to wait weeks and weeks for each new issue, but the day when it finally showed up in the mail brought with it a sense of joy and excitement that made all the waiting worth it. The second issue explored Castlevania II in something like a dozen pages of glory. The fourth issue explored Zelda II. The fifth issue covered Ninja Gaiden. Issue six was about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By the end of the year we had cover stories about Mega Man 2, Duck Tales and Tetris. This wasn't just an awesome magazine about video games, it was an awesome magazine about arguably the best days of Nintendo.
While I got the first issue as part of their free mail-out promotion, the first official issue of the magazine that my subscription provided was March / April 1989, the 5th issue (the Ninja Gaiden one). I would renew my subscription seven more times, sometimes well before re-subscribing was necessary so I could capitalize on awesome deals like the free copy of Dragon Warrior (what an awesome reward for a first year anniversary) and the bonus strategy guides such as the NES Atlas and Super NES guide. Of course the magazine itself continued to be awesome, with the extensive coverage that announced Dragon Warrior's release as well as great new games like Mario 3, Castlevania III, Mega Man 3, Startropics, Maniac Mansion and Final Fantasy. These were awesome days to be a Nintendo fan.
By about 1991 or 1992, however, I began to grow out of the magazine. I was in my early teens at this point and started to wince when the covers of the magazine were plastered with cartoony images of Mickey Mouse, Looney Tunes, Lemmings, and Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt. The quality of the magazine was probably still about the same, most of the features that I loved still remained, but my gaming palate was simply expanding. I was playing more "hip" games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Toejam and Earl, and generally just growing past the age when a magazine about video games would fill me with wide-eyed wonder. I still enjoyed them, especially the issues that covered games that I really loved (Mortal Kombat II, Street Fighter 2, Final Fantasy III, Super Metroid, etc.) but I no longer found them to be the indispensable treasure trove of joy to be pored over for an entire lost weekend. The fact that I now owned a Sega Genesis, as well as the fact that the magazine was more "adult", led me to start relying on Electronic Gaming Monthly much more as my magazine of choice.
But still, I managed to hang on to my love of Nintendo, and their flagship magazine, all the way until early 1996. The last issue that I remember getting in the mail was number 82, which featured the cutting-edge Super Mario RPG on the cover. It was an appropriate send-off to the magazine that began with the cutting-edge Super Mario Bros. 2, and I made sure to grab the very last issue of the publication that came out around the end of 2012. To this day I'm not interested in collecting all the issues of NP that were ever released. My digital collection stands at those 82 issues that represent such a huge, memorable, and just plain fun part of my childhood.