Alright, so the only real link this has to mobile gaming is that Nintendo is also making mobile games now, but I thought this article was so interesting that it felt worth sharing- Particularly with how many of our readers seem to have such nostalgic ties to the glory days of NES gaming. Over the weekend, The AV Club posted an amazing interview on what it was like to be a Nintendo game play counselor. If you don’t remember (or weren’t around to remember) what that was, the game counselors were who was on the other end of the phone when you called the Nintendo Powerline when you got stuck in a Nintendo game.
The thought of needing to call someone to get help in a video game now days is laughable, but consider these services were back from a time where when you got stuck in a game you couldn’t just type the first few words of the problem you’re having, have Google auto-complete the rest, and take you directly to the solution. You were at the mercy of hopefully knowing someone who knows, having a issue of a game magazine that had a walkthrough, or just straight up call the Nintendo Powerline. I never personally did, because, again another thing that’s unthinkable in 2015, I was terrified of how expensive long distance phone calls could be.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
…[W]e didn’t have any more information than the public did, except we had done our own research. It was very, very rare that we would get things that weren’t available to the public. Everybody always thought we had these secrets or cheats or different things like that. The only thing we had—we had all the available information in front of us, or we had some amazing people who would literally hand-draw these maps. Shaun, I think you did a bunch of them. And they’d get passed out.
Back then, color printers weren’t that common. We’d have to get permission to make a color print or whatever. Eventually, they got a computer system. But again, it wasn’t any great information that we had that wasn’t available to someone else. Anybody else could’ve sat down and literally played the game like we did. Most of the time, we didn’t even get the games until they were released. There would be always games, especially from Capcom: “Oh, what, Mega Man 3’s out? Yeah, we don’t have that one yet.”
You should really just go read the whole thing, also a few years ago Kotaku posted some shots of what was in the game guides mentioned above, which is also totally worth a look.
