Club Nintendo (magazine)

Club Nintendo was Nintendo's official, bimonthly published magazine in Germany, with issue 1/1998 also in Austria and Switzerland. It can be seen as the German equivalent to the American Nintendo Power. The first issue was published in 1989. The magazine's precursor was called Play Nintendo, and was published in November 1988. It featured only eight pages per issue, and was styled more similarly to a newsletter than a magazine. Until 2001, the number of pages greatly increased throughout the years. In 2000, one issue of Club Nintendo had over 80 pages.

In 2001, because of redeployment at Nintendo of Europe, the old staff of the magazine was laid off, and a German publishing company called Computec Media continued the magazine with a new staff team. The new incarnation had far fewer pages and was canceled after the release of the April 2002 issue.

Club Nintendo is also the name of official Nintendo magazines from various other countries, most of which have been discontinued. Club Nintendo México, the official Nintendo magazine in Latin America, was the longest-lasting of all the Club Nintendo magazines, not being discontinued until 2019.

Comics
A unique feature of the magazine were the Nintendo comics, most of which were exclusively made for the magazine issue. The comics in the issues from 1991 to 1998 were drawn by Japanese manga artists (Mangaka), while the stories and texts were written by the German editors of the magazine themselves. In 1999 and 2000, they were replaced by a comic series called N-Gang, which are completely German productions. N-Gang features teenage human characters as protagonists, but video game characters still appear. While some of the comics are closely related to the games, there are also stories which take place on Earth instead of the usual environments of various Nintendo and third-party characters. All of the Nintendo comics were only released in Germany; they were never released anywhere else.

After 2000, while the magazine was published by Computec Media, no more comics were released in Club Nintendo.

List of comics in regular issues
Comics with no characters from the Super Mario franchise as main characters are excluded. The N-Gang is described in a separate article.

List of comics in special issues
Beneath the regular issues, also special issues were published, mainly to promote new Nintendo games and other products.

1993 Calendar
The final issue of 1992 contained a calendar. Each month had different artwork of Mario representing various countries.