Note: All images in this article are sourced from my own scans, unless otherwise indicated, and are (c) 1989 Bantam Books, Inc.
I still remember the day I saw this book sitting on the shelf at the local Target. I was your typical 12-year old, obsessed with video games, and I had a couple of Nintendo tip books in my library already: the first volume of Jeff Rovin's How to Win At Nintendo (the expanded edition with the red cover) and Nintendo's own black bible, The Official Nintendo Players Guide.
They were great books, I'd read them multiple times, but they both had some problems to my young adult mind. The Official Nintendo Players Guide was two years old, and while it was handy for navigating Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Kid Icarus with those awesome full-color maps, there were plenty of games which had come out since then that it didn't cover. Rovin's book was newer, and it covered a lot of games the Official Players Guide didn't, but it was also a pocket-sized paperback weighing in at just over 200 pages and was all text, with no pictures or screenshots.
Then I laid eyes on this behemoth. Ultimate Unauthorized Nintendo Game Strategies was a trade paperback (larger than mass-market paperback, but smaller than a hardcover). Stuffed between those covers was an astounding 350 pages' worth of game-related goodness. The cover price was $9.99, an absolute fortune to a kid whose allowance at the time was a dollar a week. That was two-and-a-half months of washed dishes, table clean up, trash removal, picking up after the dog, and any other chore mom cared to saddle me with.
I might have been a kid, but I was also wise to the ways of the world. Books didn't stay on the shelves at Target for too long, and every couple of weeks, old stock got rotated out to make room for the new. In two and a half months, this glorious tome with its bizarre cover artwork and wealth of video game knowledge would be gone, swept away to make room for whatever Danielle Steel had written that month. It didn't help this was November either. I wouldn't be the only kid thinking about Christmas, and Target only had three copies of it on the shelf. Chances were good there were at least three other boys around my age and just as interested in Nintendo living in close proximity to that store. So I did what any desperate pre-teen in my shoes would have done: the next time I got together with my Big Brother Bruce (not a biological elder sibling, but an awesome guy I was placed with through the Big Brother/Big Sister program), I suggested we should go to Target and look around. Of course, I just happened to walk into the book section, put on my best 'holy cow, I had no idea this existed' demonstration, showed it to him excitedly, and convinced him to buy it for me.
I'm pretty sure he knew I was playing him like a pipe organ, but Bruce possessed three keen attributes: a great job, disposable income, and a willingness to make my day memorable every time we got together. Whether this was playing a game of Ping Pong at his apartment club house, working on a super awesome glue-together model of the Space Shuttle on his table, or taking me out for ten frames of bowling at the local alley, it didn't matter as long as we were having fun. So that cold November evening, he spoiled me with this monstrous tome of gaming knowledge. I'm sure to him, he was just buying me a book, probably thinking I'd read through it once and be done with it.
As I'm sure you can tell, that wasn't the case at all. That book spent months going to and from school, getting passed around during reading periods with some of my classmates, and at this point, I think the statute of limitations is up and I can admit to using a flashlight to read it under my covers at night so Mom wouldn't catch me staying up past my bedtime. Sorry, Mom! :D
So, Bruce, if you're reading this, know that the $10 you spent that chilly November day bought me thirty years of incredible memories so far, and now I'm sharing them with the rest of the world. Might not be the best ten bucks anybody ever spent, but it's gotta be up there somewhere.
To Guide or Not to Guide?
I can't answer that question.
Well, that's not true. I can answer it, just not in a way that overcomes my rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. Looking at it today, it's actually not a very good book overall. The screenshots are grainy to the point of being impossible to decipher in some cases, printed in black and white with a very low resolution. It's written to appeal to adults, even though kids made up the bulk of the NES player base in the late 80's. Some games have no screenshots, some games only have a picture of the box, and some occasionally have the wrong screenshot -- the review for Double Dragon II: The Revenge, for instance, uses a screencap from the original Double Dragon. Finally, the strategies given are just that: strategies. They aren't walkthroughs, they're more write-ups to help you decide whether or not the game might appeal to you and be worthy of your money. You might get the occasional stage select code or some passwords thrown your way, but more often than not, the information given will be more generic and wide-ranging.
That said, the book's got full-fledged info on seventy different titles, and previews for twenty-five more, plus a section on the Game Boy and several third-party peripherals available for the NES (mostly controllers) made by companies like Beeshu, Acclaim, Mattel, and Broderbund. There were even coupons (long since expired) to get you a refund on Capcom titles, or some free swag from Activision if you bought one of their games.
Sandler's occasional quips and asides are also amusing. In the section pertaining to the vertically-scrolling WW2-themed shooter 1942 for instance, he runs down a list of the secret pick-ups one can uncover by blasting away at the right areas of the screen. All are presented without commentary until he gets to the Cow, at which point his suspension of disbelief is well and truly shattered, and he writes, "Is he jumping over the moon? Doesn't he know there's a war on?" I'm sorry, that's still funny three decades later. :)
In addition, the previews section is actually home to some extremely useful (if limited) information on games that were planned but never released for some reason. Here, for example, is some information on a planned game from Matchbox that never made it out of development:
I know that's just a mock-up, but how did we never get this game?!
Urban Convoy, Web World, and Tune Up Rallye (that's actually how it's spelled) are three more titles that never saw the light of day, but I've never seen information about any of them in any other publication outside of this book. For that reason alone, it should be of interest to video game historians or NES addicts of any age. It's also the only book of this sort to cover Friday the 13th, which put it on my radar back when I was far too young to play it, since it scared the hell out of me. Ah, to be that young and innocent again... :)
It's quite cheap these days, available for under $5 on the second-hand market, and if nothing else, you and your friends can have all sorts of fun analyzing that neo-abstract desert hobo coyote cowboy on the cover.
Seriously, Bantam, what was up with that artwork?