Club Nintendo

Club Nintendo was Nintendo’s own magazine for its European customers, published from 1989. This library holds it in three languages — 61 German issues, 25 British and 24 Dutch — and holding all three is what makes it worth an entry.

The same magazine three times

The British, German and Dutch first issues are not similar. They are the same twenty pages.

Page	All three editions
2	A tick-box checklist of every NES cartridge currently available
3	“Letter From Super Mario!” / “EIN BRIEF VON SUPER MARIO!” / “BRIEF VAN SUPER MARIO!”
4	An introduction to the Nintendo Entertainment System
19	High scores, with instructions for photographing your television
20	Super Mario Bros. 2

The identity goes further down than structure. Page 19 gives the same photographic advice in all three languages — use a 35 mm camera, press pause, turn the lights off, don’t use flash — and page 20 ends on the same joke about Birdo, who in English “thinks that he is a girl”, in Dutch denkt dat hij een meisje is, and in German denkt, er sei eine Frau.

One thing changes. The address readers are told to write to:

• Club Nintendo, PO Box 30, Coventry CV1 3BR
• Postfach 54 09 47, D-2000 Hamburg 54
• Postbus 184, 3620 AD Breukelen, Nederland

A club is a thing you join somewhere. Everything else could be produced once.

Produced once, and not in Europe

The German Club Nintendo Classic of 1990 says who made it:

“Club Nintendo Classic wird von Nintendo of Europe GmbH in Zusammenarbeit mit Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd. veröffentlicht. © 1990 by Nintendo Co., Ltd.”

Published by Nintendo’s European subsidiary in cooperation with Tokuma Shoten of Tokyo — a Japanese publishing house, working on a magazine for German, British and Dutch children. The 1992 edition adds the reporting line, and it is the detail that explains the rest: the project leads are Rio Ishii (national) and Atsuko Matsumoto (international).

A European house organ with a Japanese international project lead is not three magazines that resemble each other. It is one magazine with three sets of words.

What it was not

Club Nintendo is a third arrangement, distinct from the two others this Vault has now measured, and the differences are practical rather than legal niceties.

• A licensed edition — The Games Machine in Italy — put a local publisher in charge. Edizioni Hobby had its own staff, its own letters page and its own editorial judgement, and the Italian edition eventually outlived the British one by nearly nine years.
• A re-badged export — Amiga Computing’s US Edition — kept one publisher and one editorial operation and changed the number on the cover.
• Club Nintendo is the manufacturer’s own, made centrally and localised outward. There is no local editorial judgement to diverge, which is why the three editions cannot drift apart the way Ludlow and Milan did.

The first two are magazines about an industry. The third is published by it.

⚠ This entry rests on the first issues and on two of the Classic annuals. This library holds a decade of Club Nintendo and no account of it from outside Nintendo, so nothing here says how much of the later run stayed identical between territories, and the German edition alone is held past 1993.

See also

• Nintendo Power — the American equivalent
• The Games Machine (Italy) — the licensed shape
• Amiga Computing — the re-badged shape
• Magazine distribution