Nintendo Game Pack (Topps)

Nintendo Game Pack
Topps
1989

Nintendo was big business in the 80's. Video Games, T-Shirts, Watches, you name it - they branded everything. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie and Nintendo was (somewhat) happy to divy it out - Of course with a fair amount of the profit coming back to them for the privilege of licensing a Nintendo product.

Topps' Nintendo Game Pack was a unique twist on your traditional trading card series. While most card packs from the era contained your traditional base set of trading cards, chase inserts and of course stickers, this particular series turned all of that upside down.

Rather than having a base set of cards, it's actually the stickers which are the base series. The inserts on the the other hand are scratch off games which kids could use a coin to play.

First let's take a look at all those fantastic sticker cards!

The series featured five themes; Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Punch Out, Double Dragon, The Legend of Zelda and Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link.

While some cards contained only one sticker, there were others which featured multiple ones of various characters.

As you can see, a lot the stickers featured a tone of action sequences on them making them all the more unique.

Others featured simple logos or  profiles of characters.

These were great. However, the game cards were what really take this set over the top.

Each game featured ten different cards (or screens) and played out relatively the same. You begin on the left side of the card, area 1, and have to meet a certain criteria to advance to the right side of the card, area 2. You  then have to meet a second criteria to win. 

Because each card (or screen) played out slightly different from the next, it would be difficult to sit here and tell you just exactly how to play each one. Well, not difficult, but time consuming. So we won't do that.

This is not a relatively easy set to buy loose. The reason for this is many of the loose cards were either utilized for their stickers, or scratched up as kids played the games. As such,  if this is a series you're particularly interested in your best bet is most likely going to be tracking down sealed packs or full boxes. They're not too expensive averaging around $2.00 a piece for packs. A full box on the other hand can hit you for as much as $100.00. Of course most people who buy full boxes do so to display the box and not open the packs.

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