Prior to building the temple of Destructoid and long before this whole internet thing went mainstream, I was the president of a small army of bike-riding tape-swapping Nintendo Club. The committee consisted of four other hardcore gamers from the block and a peripheral roster from our friends at school. In retrospect, it was more of a support network for the core founders: we would strategically plot game purchasing as a collective, pool money to rent video games, and manipulate parents to let us throw catered non-stop gaming marathons when a member's birthday came around. Good times, good times. Gaming aside, we also bothered the hell out of Nintendo on a regular basis with calls to Redmond on a weekly basis and letters. Awesome, stupid fanboy letters asking and recommending ridiculous things (Super Maria Sisters?!!). Unfortunately we weren't organized enough at first and lost our letters to Howard Philips, but alas the Super Nintendo era ones were saved! Today, we bring one of the few surviving ones from super secret club vault ... which also known as "that smelly yellow box in your closet". If there was anything on our mind or vague news printed on Nintendo Power, we'd fire up the Smith Corona typewriter and get a letter out asap, and we knew in 2-3 weeks we'd have our answers which would then be transcribed and drawn into the club notebooks (which I still have, I'll post some scans of those in the future). Among one of the notable responses we received was this letter back in late 1990 when Nintendo was talking about building some kind of modem-based multiplayer network which obviously never took off here, although it did have some limited activity in Japan. What is amazing to me is that the idea they publicized long ago is now turning into reality with the Wii this November ... 16 years later. Better late than never! click to zoom in Other highlights of the letter include a non-commitment to Zelda 3 and Super Mario Brothers 4. Check out the full sized scan to read the entire response -- the paper is so thin and worn out that you could read the second page through the first one, plus the occassional Chef Boyardee splash. My later letters to Nintendo grilled them about dismal shooter slow down on the SNES (3mhz?!!) and asking them why there's better Nintendo scoops on other sources like GamePro and EGM than their own Nintendo Power magazine (that one didn't go over so well).

Funny how some things never change.

True to their word, they still support their 8-bit system even though the context is different. Nintendo's secrecy policy is still intact, they are still battling leaked scoops, we all still get our breaking Nintendo news from other sources, and on a good day I'm still the annoying fanboy I've always been. Thanks for reading, and welcome to my club.