Nintendo Magazine System
An official Nintendo magazine that Nintendo did not publish
EMAP launched Nintendo Magazine System in Britain in October 1992, publishing it commercially while holding a licence from Nintendo for the characters, logos and trademarks. An Australian edition of the same name appeared under a Sydney publisher with its own staff, its own numbering and half the page count — and no printed statement of any relationship between the two.
Nintendo Magazine System was launched in Britain by EMAP in October 1992. This library holds 21 British issues and 10 Australian ones.
The licence runs the other way
The small print in issue one is the interesting part, because it inverts the arrangement this Vault records for Club Nintendo:
“Nintendo of America Inc. and its associated companies are the owners of the copyright in certain of the characters, artwork, logos, scripts, trademarks and representations used in this publication. These are under licence to EMAP.”
Club Nintendo is Nintendo publishing a magazine. Nintendo Magazine System is a commercial publisher issuing its own magazine and licensing Nintendo’s intellectual property to do it. The copyright line is EMAP’s — “© EMAP IMAGES 1992” — and the address is Farringdon Lane, not Großostheim.
So “official Nintendo magazine” describes two quite different things in this Vault, and which one a given title is can only be settled by reading its colophon:
| Publisher | What Nintendo supplies | |
|---|---|---|
| Club Nintendo | Nintendo of Europe GmbH | the magazine |
| Nintendo Magazine System | EMAP Images | a trademark and artwork licence |
An arrangement of the second kind lets a magazine carry the marks and the blessing while remaining editorially a publisher’s product — which is a different proposition for a reader than a house organ, and looks identical from the newsagent’s shelf.
The Australian edition, and what cannot be said about it
An Nintendo Magazine System also appeared in Australia. Its colophon names a different company entirely:
“Nintendo Magazine System is published by Trille Corporation, 363A Pitt Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia.”
It has its own staff — a publisher, editorial director and managing editor, all Australian, all given joke middle names on the masthead — its own numbering, and about 66 pages against the British edition’s 120. Its letters come from Adelaide, and its news is local: one reply explains that Australia will not be getting Tuff E Nuff at all, because Mattel, handling Nintendo in Australia, would wait for Street Fighter II Turbo before launching another high-profile beat ’em up.
⚠ What connects the two is not stated anywhere found here. The Australian issues name no licence, no relationship to EMAP, and no relationship to Nintendo beyond the title. A shared name, a local publisher, local staff and diverging content is exactly the profile of the licensed editions this Vault documents in Italy — but there the colophon said “Su licenza di NEWSFIELD PUBLICATION”, and here nothing says anything.
Recorded as two magazines of the same name with an unestablished relationship.
The shapes are only visible when the colophon says so
That limit is worth stating as a general one, because this is now the second time it has come up. Australian Personal Computer carries British by-lines and British column furniture and cannot be connected to its apparent parent either.
The three border-crossing arrangements this Vault distinguishes were identifiable because the magazines said which they were. Where a title crosses a border and prints nothing about why, the same shapes may well be present and simply cannot be told apart — which means the taxonomy describes what the record documents, not what happened.
See also
- Club Nintendo — the house organ, for contrast
- EMAP — the British publisher
- Magazines across borders
- Australian Personal Computer — the other unestablished crossing