Interactive Gaming Time Machine: Exploring the Nintendo Power Previews 1994 Laserdisc

Paul Palmer
NES nintendo nintendo kiosk retro games video games

As I was looking around Archive.org recently for Nintendo Power magazines, I stumbled upon this gem of a video that instantly transported me back to my early teens, browsing the Toys R Us video game aisles. It's the Nintendo Power Previews 1994 laserdisc!

For anyone that doesn't remember these, in the gaming sections of places like Toys R Us or Sears there would sometimes be official kiosks. Some were playable, but these particular kiosks, the Nintendo Power Previews, were not. They were interactive, however. On the front of these kiosks would be a series of large buttons with things like titles from upcoming games, or a gaming console, things like that. After a moment, the screen would begin playing a video based on the button you pressed. I didn't know how they worked at the time, but it makes perfect sense that there was a laserdisc player in there powering the whole thing! So you pressed a button, and it would skip to the chapter that you pressed. Basically a physical DVD menu screen.

photo of a nintendo power previews kiosk. There's a TV screen playing a game commercial, and underneath is a panel with a series of buttons that have pictures of game boxes on them.

Above is one of the old kiosks. This one is a bit newer than the video I found, as you can see it mainly features Nintendo 64 stuff. The panel with the red border has buttons underneath, and they put that overlay with the game box graphics on top. You just press the game you want to learn about and it plays the video.

This particular video is from 1994 and has a TON of great stuff packed into a half hour of runtime. There's NES, SNES and Game Boy games featured, everything from Mega Man VI to Wario Land to Mario Paint. There's even a little bit of banter from a Charles Martinet voiced Mario, and this is two years before Super Mario 64.

This picture is super tiny, but with Ken Griffy Jr Baseball on SNES being displayed, this might be the very kiosk this video would have been playing in!

Put this on for some gaming nostalgia goodness, or just have it playing in the background while you do something more productive. There's a few more of these videos on Archive.org, and I'm hoping one of them will feature this Game Boy video I remember seeing on a kiosk long ago, where they are singing, or maybe more like spoken word rapping, about taking it on a plane, or taking it to a boring movie.

Wordpress doesn't seem to let free blogs embed videos, so you'll have to click here to go see it!