As a 9 year old, the greatest day of every month was when the new issue of Nintendo Power appeared in the family mailbox. I would pour over the 100+ pages of screenshots and game previews the same way a medieval monk would a sacred religious text.

Nintendo Power was Nintendo of America’s internally-produced, official magazine. It was distributed in the US and Canada from 1988 until 2012. The monthly magazine was filled with maps, comics, cheat codes, previews and even high-scores submitted by players. If you were not so fortunate to have a subscription you can check out the first issue here to get a pretty good taste of what it was like

Now that I am an adult who is creating and marketing my own games, I can see that Nintendo Power was actually a marketing tool. The most wonderful thing about it though was that I (and millions of other kids of my generation) loved reading it. Nintendo Power was a genius package of marketing and there is so much that we indie game developers can learn from it.

In this week’s column I want to take a look at how Nintendo Power was presented so that it was fun to read, built up a community, and managed to promote the company’s games without sounding like a spammy advertisement.

If you are interested in reproducing Nintendo’s success you will quickly realize that it is WAY too costly to print and distribute a magazine. But thanks to the internet you can implement something similar though the use of an email mailing list. All of the following tips I discuss are designed specifically for your mailing list. Most of these tips do not work for Twitter and Facebook because social media just doesn't have the reach or permanence that an email does. For more information as to why, see my other post why email is such a powerful way to market your game.

By the end of this post you should have some ideas of things that you can send your own mailing list to promote your own games without crassly selling out to your audience.

Selling your games is not your primary goal

The number one lesson you need to take away from Nintendo Power is that your primary goal in marketing is to entertain your target audience so that you can build a community of loyal fans. Your true fans are the ones who will buy every one of the games and evangelize them to their friends who don’t know about you yet. That word-of-mouth advertising is so very powerful and will help your game studio grow more organically.

Nintendo Power accomplished this by covering not just new games but also the many ways that their products were enjoyed by their fans.

For example, in any issue you could read about upcoming releases, games that had been out for several years, and about the fans and what they did when they were not playing Nintendo. The key was that Nintendo was NOT trying to sell sell sell you with every page in the magazine. Instead they were just documenting the ecosystem around their games and that naturally made their readers interested in buying their games. They were feeding an audience that wanted to read every single shred of news about Nintendo.

Typical table of contents with a wide variety of features

How to use this

I see many studios provide a signup form on their website and underneath it says something along the lines of “We only email you when we release a game” or “Sign up and you will only hear from us when we have news.” That is like telling someone you just met, “Hey thanks for the phone number, I am only going to call you when I need help moving”

That is the wrong attitude to have for your mailing list.

Just as Nintendo Power was feeding its hungry fans who were clamoring for news, you should also assume that your fans are just as excited to see what you have in store for them. Instead of ignoring them, send your subscribers regular, generous, and entertaining helpings of information about your games in several different contexts. When you are emailing your list, remember that you are providing news to an audience that genuinely wants to hear from you. They thought you were so interesting that they trusted you with their precious email address. Don’t just alert people to go buy something. Entertain them.

Give more than you ask

If you look at any issue of Nintendo Power, the only ads were in the front and back pages of the magazine. With over 100 pages per issue, less than 1% of the total content was directly compelling you to buy something. Nintendo Power very easily could have been a typical product catalog that is just a list of games and prices similar to retailers like Toys R Us or a SEARS.

But, even though Nintendo Power was a marketing platform for the company, they knew nobody would read it if it was just showing advertisement after advertisement. Instead they gave away more than they asked.

For example, if you open the first issue of the magazine, you get the following:

Other issues gave away things like a tear out paper craft model of the Star Fox Arwing aircraft that you could put together. (Image Credit)

The reason I loved Nintendo Power as a kid was that I knew that in every issue I was going to get a magazine full of little presents. I came to expect great things from them and was always looking forward to more.

How to use this

You need to practice a general mailing list rule-of-thumb called “give-give-give-ask.” This term means that for every one email you send asking your audience to buy your game, you should have already given them three emails containing something of value.

For example, give away your game’s soundtrack, or maps of the hard parts of the game or strategy guides for beating the bosses. Send them concept art that you created in the making of your game.

The reason you have to give away so much is that it increases the open rate of your emails. Your fans learn that when they see your email in their inbox they are going to get something cool. Your fan’s will also get a feeling that, with all that you have given them, they kind of owe it to you to at least check out your game.

The important thing is whatever you send them it has to be offered exclusively to the mailing list. You can’t just turn around and give this away on Twitter or on your personal website. You do this because there has to be an incentive for them to join and stay subscribed to your mailing list.

Give them a reason to join

In the 1980s most NES games cost about $70 in today’s currency. They were expensive. But in one legendary promotion, Nintendo sent a free copy of the RPG Dragon Warrior if you purchased a 1-year subscription to Nintendo Power. It was an insane deal.

Nintendo advertised this deal by including the following poster with every new game. (Image Credit)

Additionally,  if you renewed your subscription every year, they would give you Player's Guides for other games. These guides were essentially full walkthroughs that showed you every secret for the game.

These incentives drove millions of fans to subscribe.

Besides the giveaways, Nintendo was never shy about reminding you that Nintendo Power existed. Every Nintendo game you bought always included a small card you could fill out to subscribe. The cards were very clear that when you join you would get free stuff like cheat codes.

This card even gives you a free tip before asking you to subscribe.

Nintendo even advertised for its magazine within games. This famous blurb from Mike Tyson’s Punch-out!! advertised the Nintendo Fun Club (the distant-ancestor that later became Nintendo Power)

How to use this

There is a two prong solution that Nintendo used to get people to join:

Use both tactics to grow your mailing list subscribers. Put a signup form for you mailing list within every game of yours (don’t just link off to a website because every extra step you add means fewer subscribers). Also patch your old games to include this signup form.

From Twitter, pin a tweet reminding fans to join your mailing list to get free stuff and information. Add the signup form to your website. At conferences have a signup form (or better yet use the Mail Chimp iPad app to allow them to type in their name) 

But the most important thing you can do is give potential subscribers something of immediate value when they sign up for the mailing list. This is called a lead magnet because it gives just enough incentive to attract those casual fence-sitting fans to join.

This lead magnet should be a small digital give away. For example, give a free game or a PDF of a comic that gives the back story of one of your games. Whatever it is, you need to find something that is attractive to the audience you are trying to build.

Back catalog

In the NES era, there weren't that many games. As a kid you had to get as much life as you could out of them by replaying them until you found every secret. Nintendo Power was so great because it wasn't just filled with information about upcoming games, it gave equal time to games that were several years old. In practice, they basically made your old games more valuable to you.

For instance, the very first issue of Nintendo Power told you how to unlock the Master Quest in the first Legend of Zelda. At the time of publication of that issue, the Legend of Zelda was over a year old. This tip alone essentially gave me an entirely new game, for free. I spent the next several months replaying an old favorite.

Similarly, a year after it originally released, Nintendo published the “JUSTIN BAILEY” cheat code for Metroid which allowed you to start the game with a huge advantage. Before that code I had never finished Metroid 1 because it was way too hard. However, with this code I was finally able to. If I wasn't a subscriber, I would have never been able to extract this much value out of the game.

How to use this

Your mailing list shouldn't just be about you