Riddle me this: what happens when you take the hottest item of the 80’s and team up with a company that was just coming off one of the hottest trends of the decade to merchandise a series of trading cards? You get a heaping pile of crap. This week we look at Nintendo Gamepacks. Licensed by Nintendo of America and produced by Topps, the company that brought us the insanely cool Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980’s, Nintendo Gamepacks were released in 1989 and lasted a good year before the general populous got wise to the scam.
I remember first encountering these abominations at a flea market in Homosassa Springs, Florida. At a quarter a pop, a Nintendo fan boy would easily part with his arcade money for some Nintendo paraphernalia. After spending about five bucks on these things, I felt like I had wasted my time. For me, five bucks bought a whole lot of Gyruss and Street Fighter – games that I’d never get back thanks to the evil these things brought.
Enough of the history lesson, let’s get into the gamepacks themselves. Each package was represented by Nintendo’s heaviest hitters of the time, namely Mario, Princess Peach (then known as Princess Toadstool), and Link. Each package got you two stickers and three scratch game cards in addition to the “top secret tips” the package boasted. You may be thinking “hey, that’s pretty cool”, but hold the Wagon cowboy, the worst is yet to come. There were only six games represented throughout the series. At the time, Super Mario 2 and Zelda II had just been released and were heavily pushed. Maybe the representation of the “black sheep” games of the two series’ was an omen. In addition to the two sequels, Punch Out!, the original Super Mario Bros, and the original Legend of Zelda also got some hot trading card love. From out of freakin’ left field, Double Dragon also got a few stickers and scratch games as well. I know that when I think of great games such as the Zelda’s, Mario’s, and Punch Outs that the subpar NES version of Double Dragon is right up there with them. I’m sure the CEO of Tradewest has a pair of well-worn kneepads hanging on his office door.
These cards lacked style, grace, and the ever-important Nintendo Seal of Quality we all knew and loved. There’s little in the way of any original art here. If you’ve read any of the instruction manuals for these games, you’ve seen the artwork on these cards. What you’ll get for each card is some Nintendo clip-art from an instruction manual on some poorly drawn background, or worse, a sticker some sort of stupid saying like “Win with Mario” or “We’ve got a score to settle” accompanied by some totally unrelated picture. There weren’t too many stickers, maybe in the neighborhood of ten to twelve, and I suppose it was cool to an extent to stick cheep-cheeps all over your NES, but looking at the big picture, you’re still paying a quarter for a couple of crappy stickers. It would have been nice if the artists would have colored things that weren't ripped from a game manual.
The only game to get dedicated artwork is Punch Out! and even then, it’s pretty damn shoddy. Just take a look at these mug shots of the boxers.
Worse than that are the game cards where Topps looks to have used one drawing and just switched out the heads of the characters. Check out Bald Bull, he looks like he just got back from a ten-day bender in Amsterdam wish Soda Popinski. Ugly stuff, man; though the cartoony crowd is a nice touch towards clashing art styles.
If you’re thinking there’s solace in the scratch games, boy do I have a surprise for you! The scratch game cards follow the same timeless production values as the stickers. The scratch game cards work like the lottery, only without the hope of winning endless amounts of cash and ten times the regret. You’ll get a scene with the traditional clip-art seen in the stickers on some half-assed background. There are circles that you can scratch to reveal icons that count towards winning or losing. Usually the goals of these games never go beyond “get three swords to win” or the overly complex Double Dragon game’s “get 2 kicks or 4 punches to win” goal.
Attempting to play the scratch games is a lesson in futility. Not only are they hopelessly boring, but I also realized I have a knack of scratching right through the card and leaving a bunch of frayed confetti where a sword, kick, or punch should have been. HULK SCRATCH! This is why I don’t play the damn lottery. Apparently other people haven’t had this issue, but if memory serves me right I always have so I won’t play the “these cards are over fifteen years old” excuse. I was only in it for the stickers anyways, only nerds played the stupid scratch games.
The real icing on this craptacular cake likes in the “ZOMG Super Secret Tips” you’ll find on the back of the sticker cards. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for as your quarter got you such priceless information as “defeat Birdo in SMB2 by throwing his eggs back at him” or “be sure to talk to everyone in Town by pressing A in Zelda II”. If you’re stuck on level 1-1 in Super Mario 2 and need some shitcard to tell you how to pass it, you just don’t deserve to play the game. In some attempt to add legitimacy to these “secret” tips, you get some caricature of a super secret agent making some gesture as to keep this a secret from everyone else. Looking at the guy, he looks like he’s Russian and being a child of the 80’s, I was conditioned not to trust them. Homeboy was probably working for food anyways. I’d fire him if I had the heart…I’d probably just throw him a bottle of vodka, shake my fist menacingly, and walk away.
As much as I’m bitching about wasting my money on these back in the day, it hurts much worse to pay a buck each to get these things back off of Ebay. I was stressing that I’d get some sort of nostalgic feeling from these and lose my hatred for these things, but I can honestly say I hate them more than ever now. As much as I may complain about how many copies of cash-ins such as Enter the Matrix or Bulletproof have sold, I know that they’re the lesser of the evils. By far, the most vile of them all came in a small yellow package and was sold for a quarter. I'm not sure how well these sold, but considering these came out in the heyday of the NES, they probably sold pretty damn well. No matter how much we may wax nostalgic about growing up on the NES or the neat ass toys we got from McDonald's Happy Boxes, these cards are better left as a memory reserved for those conversations where we talked about everything that was wrong about a particular decade....like big hair or cock rock.
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Riddle me this: what happens when you take the hottest item of the 80’s and team up with a company that was just coming off one of the hottest trends of the decade to merchandise a series of trading cards? You get a heaping pile of crap. This week we look at Nintendo Gamepacks. Licensed by Nintendo of America and produced by Topps, the company that brought us the insanely cool Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980’s, Nintendo Gamepacks were released in 1989 and lasted a good year before the general populous got wise to the scam.
