Why did Nintendo publish America's early game guides itself?
In the NES years there was no strategy guide industry to license a book to, and Nintendo was already in the help business on three fronts at once. It ran a club, then a magazine, and a staffed hint telephone line, the Nintendo Power Line, which ran from 1988 to June 2010. The guide books grew directly out of that service: they were the magazine's knowledge, bound.
The magazine first
Nintendo Power, 1988 to 2012Nintendo Power was first published in July and August 1988 as Nintendo's official print magazine for North America, founded by Nintendo of America marketing manager Gail Tilden. It replaced the Nintendo Fun Club News, a free newsletter discontinued after seven issues, and every Fun Club member received a free copy of the first issue, which spotlighted Super Mario Bros. 2; 3.6 million copies of that issue were published. From the beginning the magazine focused heavily on game strategy. The book line followed under the same roof: a series called Official Guides from Nintendo Power, beginning with The Official Nintendo Player's Guide.
What the books looked like
Many games in one book, then one game per bookThe Official Nintendo Player's Guide of 1987 covered dozens of NES games in depth, the first Castlevania among them, and the NES Game Atlas of 1991 gave all three NES Castlevania games a Castles of Horror chapter with full maps, as the Library's Castlevania guide page records. From 1991 through 2007, Nintendo Power published official Player's Guides for big Nintendo games. A platform holder publishing its own guides kept the help official, and kept the spoilers and maps under its own control.
The handover
2007, and afterIn October 2007 Nintendo licensed Nintendo Power to Future USA. After that takeover, the Player's Guide series was dropped, leaving Prima Games to produce the guides, and Prima's own partnership with Nintendo dates to the same period. The magazine itself ended with volume 285, released December 11, 2012, after 24 years. So the American guide trade did not begin with independent publishers and get absorbed by a platform holder. It began with the platform holder, and the independents inherited it.