ONM Remembered – prelude to Pack-In Week
“Very, very fast at top speed, but you’ll never get Tommy there, as he’s so fat that his cornering and acceleration don’t exist in this universe. Sorry Tommy, we defend anyone’s right to eat burgers all day (or Ginster’s Chicken and Mushroom Slices, in our case), but to be honest, you’re useless.”
from N64 Magazine issue 14 (April 1998)
I’ve sung the praises of N64 Magazine’s love and care put into their magazine, from their graphic design to their punchy writing. But there’s another checkmark in their favour (that I probably unfairly cracked wise about before) – their pack-in guidebooks! Starting in issue 11 they began packing in cheap little books that offered tips and tricks to various games, from suggested tactics in racing games to thought-out solutions to Blast Corps puzzles.
Admittedly they’re not so hot after the fact – they’re not the interesting relics like the magazines themselves are, and besides the cute covers featuring Worldy Bloke there’s nothing visually exciting about their insides, but they were certainly a nice extra and one way of packing more into each mag, even when it was already bursting with a hundred-plus pages per month. Those folks worked their butts off is what I’m saying!
You might have guessed I just unearthed a bunch of pack-in booklets belonging to my Nintendo magazines. I’d covered other pack-ins in the past like ONM’s calendar, the two card games… and that’s probably all, actually, but I figured these deserve their time in the spotlight as well. The theme for the next seven days: PACK-IN WEEK! You’ll find more words dedicated to pocket-sized tips books than they probably deserve!
