![]() This is the January 1992 chart for the SNES. Because the points breakdown for each category was absent, you didn't know if those unreleased games were voted for by readers or if it was Nintendo employees and salesmen. On top of that, because the SNES didn't have many games out yet, a good chunk of the chart consists of whatever was actually out at the time, quality be damned, and unreleased games that people voted for. By this time they stopped providing those points breakdowns from the Players/Pros/Dealers categories, so there's less data to gleam off the charts as a whole. ![]() The January 1992 issue of Nintendo Power changed the Top 30, which was only for NES games, into the Top 20, and gave the Game Boy and SNES their own top 20 categories next to the NES. Since this was all pre-internet and nobody did any real serious inquiry as to what people of the time really enjoyed, this is one of the few sources that gave insight into what was popular for the era, taken with a grain of salt of course. And since the voting was only done by people who read the magazine, Nintendo employees, and allegedly sales people, the charts heavily favored Nintendo first-party titles, with the occasional third-party title grabbing the top position such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the like. ![]() While they provided a points breakdown for each category, they never really explained what the points were based on, or the math that was involved to determine the top games. During the NES days, games were ranked according to a points system from three different groups: "Players' Picks" which were game votes from magazine readers, "Pros' Picks" which were apparently votes from Nintendo Game Counselors and possibly other employees, and "Dealers' Picks" which was either based on what retailers thought would sell well or was based on sales data or whatever since this was never really specified. The magazine's ranking system for the Top 30 NES Games, then later Top 20 for each platform, was always kinda vague. Or so I thought, but I figured I'd talk about A Link to the Past's Nintendo Power reign in the Top (Number) Charts. I don't have any fun (annoying) history tidbits for ALttP because I figure everybody knows everything about Nintendo history at this point. most positive about Nintendo) letters won some pretty impressive prizes each month. There was a monthly feature named "Mario's Hammer Time" where readers would send in a PlayStation or Saturn console or peripheral to, well, get smashed with a hammer. According to NOM, the N64 dominated the console market and the GreyStation was a failure with no good games whatsoever, and if a PlayStation game got ported to the N64 they were quick to talk up how much better the N64 version is than that lovely old GreyStation rubbish. They could not stop making GBS threads on the PlayStation, or "Fony GreyStation" as they so creatively called it. ![]() ![]() While most official mags would generally avoid mention of competing consoles or very briefly acknowledge them if a game got ported, NOM went all in with the console warrior poo poo. In hindsight, NOM circa 1998-2000 was half Nintendo advertisement, half cult manual for children. N64 Magazine was obviously the best one, but I mostly read Nintendo Official Magazine because the language was so much simpler and easier for me to understand as a young kid who had just started learning English at school. I read a lot of UK Nintendo magazines in the 90s because there were no dedicated Nintendo mags in Finland at that point. ![]()
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