The Club Nintendo Feeling
Club Nintendo was free, which was the first thing I loved about it. You picked it up from the display at the electronics counter in department stores, took it home, and read it cover to cover before you’d even put your bag down. Technically it was a promotional circular—surveys to mail back, a loyalty points system, Nintendo’s marketing dressed as editorial—but none of that registered when you were ten. It was a magazine about games, and games were everything. Some issues had cardboard figures you could cut out and stand on a shelf. I cut them all out.
The 90s gaming press had a whole ecosystem: TOTAL!, a German Nintendo magazine with enthusiast energy way beyond its promotional mandate; MAN!AC for the PC and multi-platform crowd; Bravo Screenfun for teenagers who needed game coverage delivered alongside pop gossip; and GEE, later, for people who’d grown up enough to want actual criticism. I spent more money on all of them than I ever spent on games themselves, which is either a testament to their quality or evidence of something concerning in my early relationship to media objects.
The internet dissolved the whole category in roughly three years. Walkthroughs moved to dedicated wikis. News moved to blogs. Screenshots went from curated rarity to infinite scroll. The dense, ad-filled, screenshot-packed print bible became ancestral—a relic of the era when reading about games was itself a discrete pleasure, separate from playing them.
And then someone started a new one anyway. A Profound Waste of Time is a print games magazine, 2018, around twenty euros an issue. The first issue covers Life is Strange, Yoshi’s Story, Final Fantasy—a selection that suggests a commitment to depth and nostalgia over breaking news. The illustrations are dense, the writing takes its subjects seriously as cultural objects rather than consumer products, and the whole thing functions as an argument: that games are worth the kind of attention usually reserved for literature or film, and that print is still the right container for making that case.
There are no cardboard figures to cut out. But the feeling’s the same.