Hello NAers,
As I noted in my “returning” thread, there appears to be a severe lack of information regarding Nintendo store displays in the collecting community. Over the next few months, I intend to share some of the information I’ve gathered through my 15+ years of collecting.
This is the first of multiple posts I will make and is intended as a primer / 101 of display collecting. This post will cover:
- 1st Party Nintendo POP (point of purchase displays)
This particular thread will NOT cover
- Retail Merchandise (i.e. liscensed Nintendo stuff you could buy in stores)
- Nintendo Employee Items (i.e. hats, shirts, paperwork, etc.)
- E3 / CES / Journalist Promotional Swag (stuff given away at E3 / CES or given to journalists)
I’ll post more info on these in the future
Introduction
It’s the year 198X. Autumn has arrived and there is a chill in the air. Mom brings you to your local Toys R’ Us store. As you wander around, you see a bright, colorful area in the back of the store. Intricate green pipes bend across the ceiling. Flashing lights blink out “World of Nintendo” on a sign above your head. It looks something like this:
Now its 199X. You’re an angsty teenager who is, for some reason, still playing Nintendo games. You walk into the same Toys R’ Us store and see this:
From the late 80s through the early 2000s, Nintendo was an in-store marketing juggernaut that devoted absolutely insane amounts of money and time to designing beautifully engineered, eyecatching POP (point of purchase) displays, posters, signs, banners, and more. They used almost every material / shape / and size of display you could imagine.
Unfortunately, beginning with the market failure of the N64, Nintendo started running into budgetary issues and had to scale back its efforts. Visiting a game store today is a depressing experience, with maybe one or two cool displays in the whole place if you’re lucky. Owning a surviving display is a great way of capturing the magic of the bygone golden age of video game retailing.
Now that I’ve set the stage, who designed these displays? How were they made? How did they get into the stores? How many were made? I will answer all of these questions and more below.
Part 1: Design and Production
Believe it or not, Nintendo DID NOT design their store displays in-house; instead, they outsourced the design to a small studio in Seattle. I was lucky enough to meet the (new) owner when the company was sold in 2010, and had the privilege of purchasing the archives of the company.
The design process began with Nintendo faxing over information, concept art, and designs for upcoming games or system launches. The studio would then assign the project to its design teams, who would come up with artwork / concepts for POP displays, which would then be faxed to Nintendo for approval:
Interesting fact, one of the first marketing bigwigs at Nintendo HATED the color green. Because of this, you will see minimal use of this color in early Nintendo displays.
After Nintendo approved a particular design, Nintendo would come up with a pitch book for the executives that looked like this:
These books would contain all the variations that they had intended to produce for a particular display, the part number (more on this later), and the
quantity to be produced! As you can see from the photos above, very few displays were actually made, with most production runs being between 500-1000 units. Given the fact that the vast majority were thrown out after the promotion had ended, I would estimate
less than 50-100 of most displays are still in existence!
Production of these displays were outsourced to various companies across America depending on the complexity of the POP and the materials used. This is the part of the process I have the least info on as Nintendo was incredibly secretive when it came to this. All I know is that displays cost anywhere from $5-10 to produce for simple displays to $100s of dollars for the more complex ones, like the blinking fiberoptic signs.
Part 2: Ordering / Sales
Believe it or not, stores actually paid for / purchased Nintendo displays, although some basic displays were given away for free. This process was much more informal in the early days of Nintendo, but by the early 90s, these purchases were done through “Source Books”.
These were bi-annual binders sent to various retailers containing information about upcoming Nintendo products. One of the sections was “merchandising”. It contained photos of all the upcoming displays. In the back, there was an ordering form with prices
Part 3: Transportation and Merchandising
The division at Nintendo that handled in-store advertising was known as Nintendo Merchandising (NMI). Displays purchased by stores were sent directly to the store. The stores had the ability to ask their local NMI rep for help in setting up the display.
Below is a photo of the NMI reps in 1999
The NMI rep would have a group of stores they would be responsible for, and would visit different stores every day, informing the electronics manager about the latest releases, cleaning up the isles, and moving around signs to meet Nintendo provided Planograms. Some free displays were sent directly to the NMI reps, who would bring them into the stores to install.
Part 4: Identifying 1st party Nintendo Displays
Nintendo has used various methods of cataloging POP displays through the years. From the beginning of the NES, Nintendo used “M” numbers, which you may be familiar with due to Bunnyboys excellent thread documenting many of these displays.
“M” number displays started with “M1” for the first NES display and were used into the 100s. Sometimes a system prefix like “NES” was added to the code, and letters were added after the code to denote a display (I.e. NES M32WB).
For the earliest displays, “M” numbers were not actually printed on them, but were documented in source books and various design / materials sent to stores, in addition to being printed on the original shipping boxes. This practice continued through the early 90s.
Sometime around 91 or 92, Nintendo switched to actually printing “M” numbers on displays. At the same time, Nintendo began transitioning from the “M” numbers to “Part Numbers”. These were 5 digit codes identifying a particular display. Nintendo began printing both a “M” number and a Part Number on larger / more expensive displays, and using only a Part Number for the smaller ones.
Please note that Nintendo was not always consistent with this practice so you may find some exceptions, but the following rule of thumb usually holds:
- 1985 - 1992 displays: “M” series number only, printed on box
- 1992 – early 2000s displays: “M” series number and Part Number printed on larger displays, just a Part Number printed on smaller ones.
- Mid 2000s to Present: Just Part Numbers printed on displays.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading this post, I hope I’ve been able to provide some useful information for those interested in these beautiful old signs. I intend to post more information on similar topics in the future, and perhaps create some Youtube videos / a database of “M” numbers and part numbers. Please let me know what you think and if you have any questions I will try my best to answer them.
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