I instantly got distracted when he showed an issue of Nintendo Power (the January 1994 issue, to be precise) and ended up flipping through it. A few personal highlights:
- Apparently there was a Japan-only NES game called アメリカ大統領選挙 based off of the yet-to-be-decided 1988 US presidential election featuring playable characters like “Push” and “Thutcher”. One detail I love is that they added the ever-important blood types to their profiles; they also note that Push is a WASP, which I can’t imagine would mean much to a Japanese audience.
- In that same feature on Japan-only games, they feature a Dragon Ball Z game…but since this is a few years before DBZ would ever air in the States, they write out the title as “Dragon Ballz”
- Goddamn, Super Metroid still looks so sick. And I love the cute concept art!
- Wario ahegao
I am still apparently terrible at Magic Eye images after all these years, and my eyes are a bit sore now, but here’s what I got for the ones in Nintendo Power
spoiler
- Yoshi
…uh, anyway, lovely video! LGR is always so cozy, and I appreciate the effort Clint goes to in order to pull contemporaneous articles and ads from the era. Was interesting to learn how a random idea for a print ad led to such a huge phenomenon. Despite sucking at Magic Eyes, I did find the ones generated by that program to be significantly easier to see just as he said, and it was cool to see how the sausage gets made.
Choice quote from the September 8, 1994 Detroit Free Press interview with the company founder that shows up at 7:07:
quote
All of which has made Tom Baccei a rich man. Since he began his company, retail sales worldwide have in the of $100 million. N.E. Thing, with just 7 or 8 employees (four of whom are artists), should net over $1 million this year and, Baccei says, “a lot of this will end up mine. … My life has turned into a fairy tale.”
Or it would if he’d let it. “I haven’t spent the money.” He hasn’t taken a vacation. He doesn’t spend extra days with his family; he is single and has no children. Mostly he works, sometimes 80 hours a week. “I am an obsessive sort of person. I’m not going to light the fuse and let somebody else get the bang. I didn’t think it would be this big, but I knew it would make money.”
He suspects that if he ever does take a vacation, he’ll find it difficult to return. “If I take a six-week cruise, I’m out of here,” he says.
But then there’s always the next project to fetch him back, and there’s no telling what that project might be. While Baccei enjoys the creative aspects of his work, he doesn’t cite artistic talent as the reason for his success.
“This year I’m selling three-dimensional pictures. Next year it could be cellophane toilet seat covers.”
What is it about rich businessmen and not actually enjoying their riches?
