A little festive treat: Nintek

Back in the summer of 1996, a bunch of friends and I put together two issues of an ill-fated fanzine all about our love of Nintendo. We called it Nintek and, acting in the role of editor, chief writer and general page layer-outer (since I was the only one of my friends with access to a ‘computer’ at the time), I designed, printed and sold the fanzine all around my school, much to the bemusement of my classmates and teachers at the time.

Today, as a little bit of festive fun (and because I’ve been writing about Nintendo a lot lately), I thought I’d share some of its highlights with you.

Issue 1: see if you can spot the glaring error on the front cover

As a magazine, Nintek’s mandate was simple. Since none of my friends had access to any inside news sources (because remember, this was back in the days before the internet), we decided not to market ourselves as a ‘news magazine’ as such, but rather as a kind of encyclopedia of the games industry as it stood at the time.

Each issue of Nintek would serve as a love letter to a specific aspect of Nintendo, with issue 1 dealing with Mario, issue 2 being all about British company Rare and issue 3 (which was sadly never finished thanks to all my writers changing schools halfway through production) based around the then-revolutionary FX chip and the handful of games which took advantage of it, like Starwing, Doom and Stunt Race FX.

Issue 2 was a much better-looking, cheaper and longer affair than its predecessor. It still failed to break even

My favourite part of the magazine, however, has to be the Sega Saga, a monthly feature which was pretty much the worst piece of games journalism I’ve ever seen in my life. The whole thing was basically a giant smear campaign against Nintendo’s then arch-rivals Sega. Reading it now is like looking at a check list of what not to do when writing something labelled ‘news’.

Here, for your reading pleasure, is the first article of the Sega Saga in its entirety:

Sega are a bit mad! No I shall rephrase that. Sega are madder than the maddest man on the maddest day eating something very mad (such as mad cow desease infected beef!)

And for those of your who are insain, i.e sega fans, and need a bit of proof to support this shocking news…HERE IT IS!….

Sega although mad are not that stupid. You see thay reliased that every one else was one (or maby two), steps ahead of them. So thay paniced and started relesing identical consols like the Megadrive II and Sega CD II untill thay were out of monney. Then they looked at what should have been a flourishing business, but instead was a failure simply because thay had not planned things through. For example thay splashed out on the 32X, which was’nt very popular at all, because people like Nintendo kept fine tuning their consols to squeeze every last bit of memery out of them.

So Sega decided that their only option was to take out a multi-million pound loan from the bank and bring out a bulky, non-fationable, slow and very expensive consol known as the SATERN!

And now we are up to the present day.

Now when you have a loan what do you do? Obvious, you pay it off! Not Sega. Thay just take out an even bigger loan and are all set to relise the Sega SATERN 5! No it’s not a printing mistake the SATERN 5 is all geared up for a relese around about the time that the NU64 hits the shops in Japan. It will be good for a laugh!

Journalism at its finest!

If you can squint past the terrible spelling mistakes and hyperbole, there is actually a shred of truth in this article, as Sega really did bankrupt themselves by releasing hardware revisions without any sort of long-term strategy. However, coming from my 12-year-old self, the whole thing just comes across as a ‘Na na na na na! My Dad’s better than your Dad!’ sort of thing, which is pretty hilarious to read nowadays and I doubt did much at the time to sway any would-be converts.

A typical spread from the second issue. Note the use of actual pictures, which was pretty difficult to do at the time

I doubt anyone would ever call the work we did on Nintek ‘good’ but these two issues serve today as a quaint reminder of simpler, care-free times, when all I ever needed to achieve something was a couple of friends, a lot of enthusiasm and bunch of free time. Let’s face it — Nintek was a real thing, that was both made and sold (albeit at a loss). My 12-year-old self had a vision, and he had the determination and enthusiasm to see that vision through to completion, no matter how amateur the end result might be.

I have to say, that’s a pretty humbling lesson to learn from a 12-year-old version of yourself, and it’s something I will try to remember as 2013 finally draws to a close and we all start once more looking to the future and the many dreams that are still to be realised.

A typical spread from the first issue. This review for Super Mario All Stars is probably the best thing I wrote for the magazine… which really isn’t saying much, believe me