{"id":102550,"date":"2019-10-26T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-26T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2019\/10\/feature_how_fangamer_changed_the_world_of_video_game_merchandise_forever"},"modified":"2019-10-26T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-26T16:00:00","slug":"feature-how-fangamer-changed-the-world-of-video-game-merchandise-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/10\/26\/feature-how-fangamer-changed-the-world-of-video-game-merchandise-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Feature: How Fangamer Changed The World Of Video Game Merchandise Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Fangamer\"<\/a>\u00a9 Fangamer<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Before the turn of the century brought with it online communities, before the standard for monetary transactions became digital, and not to mention, before good old-fashioned globalism<\/em>, being able to officially declare your super fandom for almost anything you can think of meant frequent trips to your letterbox.<\/p>\n

Offbeat creators spanning decades have contributed to this practice; if you could mould plastic, no marketing technique bested having children mail-in cereal box tops or magazine pages in exchange for toys. For decades, star professional baseball players returned from their road trips to a bag full of fan mail, which they responded to with an autograph, or not (and as a fan, not knowing if they would respond was part of the fun). Perhaps you\u2019re still a card-carrying member of the KISS Army, or an official Aquabats Cadet? Oh, and if you lived during the early 1990s and wanted to see Queen perform but didn\u2019t live near a big city, not to worry; someone out there was available to sell you a VHS mixtape of (possibly) any song you wanted to see performed live, provided your check cleared. For motivated people with specific tastes, their flames didn\u2019t need any extra help, they could fan themselves \u2013 pun intended.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet today, the aforementioned online oasis, debit cards, and globalism have supplanted the grind for these curios. Whatever you\u2019re into these days, people can probably tell<\/em>. The barrier to entry for finding a nook and spending on it has been lifted, and your weird thing, whether it\u2019s Star Trek<\/strong> or monster trucks or porcelain dolls, has an outlet somewhere<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And through that journey into the throes of mass communication, virtually no entity better charts the niche-to-blimp evolution of modern-day fandom than Nintendo. Why? Because arguably no other \u201cthing\u201d has more picturesquely existed within both extreme ends of the fandom spectrum.<\/p>\n

The Evolution of Nintendo Fandom<\/h3>\n

By the mid-1990s, after reinventing itself as a company and accomplishing the Herculean task of re-popularizing video games for the home, Nintendo was still largely a Japanese export. Even the company\u2019s most-funded and concerted products \u2013 its video games \u2013 took additional months, if not years to leave the island before being localized into other markets like Latin America, Europe, and America, among others, often in turn. Leveraging its rapidly-growing market and mindshare during this global growth period meant intrepid but detached business endeavours carried out over an ocean.<\/p>\n

The early to mid-1990s for Nintendo was a time following arcades-only and before Mario<\/strong>-everywhere. It was when supply and demand intersected with the just-plain-weird. Style guides were looser, as their forays into American cartoons and movies have permanently reminded us. But more than just to sit here and call it silly, this is to illustrate that unlike today, Nintendo\u2019s product licensing was then not yet as intricately tied to their overall revenue. Nintendo\u2019s bread-and-butter were cartridges and consoles, everything else was more closely the result of their marketing budget for promoting said cartridges and consoles.<\/p>\n

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Sure, there was an ever-increasing amount of Nintendo \u201cstuff\u201d coming in and out of the toy aisle, illustrating Nintendo\u2019s eagerness to echo its olden toy-maker days. Mario was put on everything<\/em>, from plush animals to lunchboxes to party favours. But the history of Nintendo merchandise is heavily littered with one-and-done folderol often made to promote a corresponding game.<\/p>\n

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The history of Nintendo merchandise is heavily littered with one-and-done folderol often made to promote a corresponding game<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Did you want to celebrate your love of the relatively obscure Mario game, Mario Paint<\/a><\/strong>? Impress your friends with the official Mario Paint paintbrush<\/a>, provided you collected the needed number of cereal box tops, while supplies lasted. Famously, for one month only, you could enjoy a McDonald\u2019s hamburger with a bouncing Goomba (specifically from Super Mario Bros. 3<\/a><\/strong>, naturally), or any one of three other Happy Meal toys<\/a> included in every box. And nobody can tell the time in style better than those wearing an LCD watch featuring not just any old Mario on the band, but Cape Mario from Super Mario World\u2122<\/a><\/strong>. But there was one major exception. Among all this trial and error, none of these overseas marketing decisions cast a larger shadow of influence than the company\u2019s invention of an official print magazine for English speakers. It aptly bore a name to match the company\u2019s surging popularity: Nintendo Power.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nintendo Power was a magazine not exactly for traditional news, nor was it for culture pieces. It was a means for communicating Donkey Kong\u2019s<\/strong> latest high score, for delivering up-to-the-month press releases, and the only place to get, say, an official Ninja Gaiden<\/a><\/strong> poster. In all, it too was basically just marketing for its games. But as largely the only consistent, non-game product put out by Nintendo at the time, it bred its own culture of fanaticism. And like anything else back then, there were no shortcuts to being a fan. You needed a self-stamped envelope to most easily be a part of it, as anyone who mailed in their dues to join the Super Power Club can attest. Nintendo Power was still predominantly for the hobbyist, but increasingly wide-reaching and most importantly, consistent.<\/p>\n

It was Nintendo right in the middle of where it was and where it is today.<\/p>\n

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Inside its pages were where the coup de grace of this spray-and-pray era lay, the (roughly) quarterly \u201cWorld of Nintendo\u201d catalogue which came packaged with Nintendo Power subscriptions during the 1990s, and which lasted until about the early 2000s. As with any turn-page catalogue of kitsch, it foreshadowed the coming of the internet\u2019s catering to the hardcore enthusiast. Inside, fiercely bizarre products tantalized kids across the country in all their technicolour glory; for every t-shirt with a logo, there was an oddity for purchase like a kite with Mario and Luigi on it, an official Punch-Out!!<\/a><\/strong> trash bin, or a Nintendo-branded director\u2019s chair. Later issues would add a toll-free hotline to streamline ordering and featured utterly unique things like full-fledged gaming soundtrack CDs in the shape of characters\u2019 heads, or official dog tags and plushies for some of Nintendo\u2019s most obscure titles. This stuff afforded a physical presence to intellectual properties probably unwise to mass-produce. Finally, an official Mario Kart 64<\/a><\/strong> stopwatch!<\/em><\/p>\n

And the vast majority of this stuff was not available in stores. It was an independent, non-wholesale warehouse. Before Mario and Pikachu plush toys were encircling us all, literally spilling off the shelves of convenience stores, Nintendo acted as a stern but gracious gatekeeper for fans of its growing brand. And this fan catalogue, hidden behind a subscription to a physical magazine that operated through a telephone hotline and the post office, was the ultimate reward to its loyalists.<\/p>\n

And it turns out there was one fan in particular who would go on to take a pretty major page out of \u201cmiddle-era Nintendo\u2019s\u201d playbook.<\/p>\n

A Starman Is Born
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When Reid Young was a young boy, he would ride inside his parents\u2019 van and read (and re-read) Nintendo Power issue 70, which featured a video game on the Super Nintendo titled \u201cEarthBound\u201d<\/a><\/strong>. He had plenty of time to read it, given the 25-minute commute between his school and his home in Indiana, a state known for farmland and cornfields. All that open-air whizzed by the van windows as he filled his brain with terms like \u201cPSI Magnet\u201d and \u201cStarman\u201d. He did not yet own this strange video game, but this physical guide for mastering it, which he kept harboured inside his bookbag, would suffice.<\/p>\n

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The site kinda became a meeting place for anyone who played EarthBound… As they came, we just kept building more and more community around that<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When Reid Young reached 14 years old, he began learning basic HTML, computers, and whatever else enriched his electronics enthusiast\u2019s brain in the year 1997. His first passion-project to really stick was a website on the then barely available internet he named “Reidman’s Strange Smileys, Sounds, Simpsons, Super Nintendo And Other Stuff”<\/a>. It was filled with many of the things he liked: The Simpsons<\/strong>, animated gifs, and naturally, EarthBound. Earthbound.net was his next venture, with a more overt focus on the game, which was then rechristened Starmen.net<\/a> around 2000.<\/p>\n

\u201cA community kinda built up around that little website that I started,\u201d says Reid Young, now CEO of Fangamer.com<\/a>. \u201cBecause it was so early on the internet, there wasn\u2019t a whole lot of other sites out there. The site kinda became a meeting place for anyone who played EarthBound… As they came, we just kept building more and more community around that.\u201d The Simpsons and the emojis, well, those things receded into the site\u2019s background. Given the site\u2019s namesake, its traffic was mostly internet modem-owning fans who wanted to discuss Ness, Paula, Poo, Jeff, and the rest of the EarthBound cast.<\/p>\n