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One day, about a month before the Nintendo 64 was set so launch, I was browsing through the magazine section of my local Borders Books and noticed a magazine that seemed to have been made especially for me! A special periodical all about the upcoming Nintendo 64, from the publishers of EGM. I paid my $9.99 and tore into the thing on the drive home (as I wouldn't be able to drive myself for another year or two). The magazine is packed with great info, ranging from stuff to get the fanboys excited to the technical specs. What really made this thing worth its money though was the included strategy guides. More than just a hype mag, it actually included complete strategy guides for Pilotwings 64 and Super Mario 64. While the strategy guides for the two games aren't really worth going back to look through, I sometimes open this magazine up to look at some of the other fun stuff, like its write-up on Miyamoto, it's look at upcoming games (a few of which were destined to be vaporware), and just to recapture the excitement of Nintendo's next big move, a revolutionary system built for 3D. Plus there's two flipbook footage segments, one of Pilotwings and one of Mario, on either side of the lower pages of the magazine! Click on any of the magazine scans to get a larger image.
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They start off documenting every little thing you could possibly want to know about the system, and probably a lot more stuff that you don'. But as I was desperate for anything that would make the wait less painful, I pored over every word writeen here. Complete timeline of the making of the N64, memory add-ons, Bulky Drive info, advanced rendering features, inside shots of the system, controller and cart, it's all here.Throughout the timeline you'll read a lot of the "Dream Team". For those of you who may not remember, Nintendo had announced that their strategy for this new amazing system was a small group of truly talented developer studios. Looking back, I kind of get the feeling that in reality this was them putting a positive marketing spin on the fact that not a lot of developers were quick to jump on the N64 bandwagon. To make a long piece of video game history short, when Nintendo was the undisputed ruler of the video game world, they were a bit cocky, getting huge royalties from companies who put games out on the NES, and making the developers front the high cartridge costs. Nintendo ruled with an iron fist back then, and when Sony came along, a lot of developers saw their chance to make a lot more profit that Nintendo would let them. Thus, I feel, Nintendo invented the "Dream Team", which early on consisted of Williams, GameTek (who I believe would go out of business before releasing their first N64 game), Lucasarts, Acclaim, Mindscape and others.
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A short article on Silicon Graphics is included, a company whose computers were noted for their amazing computer graphics featured in movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. Silicon Graphics teamed up with Nintendo to help them make the Nintendo 64 the best little computer it could be. One thing that stands out to me here is in the sidebar entitled "It's in the chips", "Advanced texture mapping techniques allow textures to be highly detailed and zoomed in without losing detail, no matter how close the player is to the object". Anyone who has seen the N64's problems with blurry textures due to developers not fully utilizing this feature might find some amusement in that statement.
Any magazine with a few pages dedicated to Miyamoto (in this case, 3) is a magazine that will withstand the test of time in my shelves. The article is pretty basic, with a brief history of the man from when he came aboard Nintendo to his work on upcoming N64 titles.The magazine ends with about fifteen pages dedicated to previews of upcoming N64 games. The pictures used here are sometimes horribly bad, and in at least one case are obviously stills from a low quality Quicktime movie. Included in the previews are some games that would be cancelled before ever seeing the light of day, such as Virgin Interactive's "Freak Boy", Gametek's "Robotech: Crystal Dreams" and GT Interactive's "Ultra Combat"(a 4 player 64-bit re-imagining of Combat for the Atari 2600). I'm not going to spend too much time here talking about these, as this will be the topic I'll cover later on in the week!
I'm really quite happy this magazine somehow survived for this long in my home, as I love looking back through the pages and remembering how it felt when I first read through it, when I absorbed absolutely every detail this book had to tell me. Thanks, EGM, for this little piece of retro ephemera!
Remember to check back here tomorrow, as I'll be doing a blog every weekday this week in celebration of the N64's birthday. Tomorrow I'll be talking about Nintendo's second best reason to own an N64 (next to their first-party games), Rare.
