Nintendo Game Play Counselor Binders
I get asked a lot about what my personal holy grail item is. Yes, the game my wife bought for me is incredibly dear, and there are a few pieces in my collection that I love very much. But if you want to talk about true white whales... for me... its these.
These are Nintendo Game Play Counselor Binders. Years ago, when gamers would call the Nintendo hotline for help, the counselors would use this knowledge base to help them. What makes these so incredibly special is that each binder is unique to the Game Play Counselor, as aside from the base set of maps and stats provided, they were encouraged to fill in their own notes and findings that they would find personally helpful. Though most of the content is photocopied, this particular set has a hand drawn set of all of the environments for Lufia II! As well as pages and pages of notes for various games.
The employee I purchased these from believes this is one of at most 5 content complete sets of binders. Many of these binders were taken and destroyed. This set is amoung the few to have been smuggled out!
Comments
This is awesome man! Do you have scans of the pages that you can share? I love this kind of stuff and thank you for sharing.
I thought about a way to do this responsibly... the problem is that most of the "originals" are photocopies. Were I to distribute the content digitally, I could inadvertantly create a market of fakes. I'm really uncomfortable with that.
I will be digitizing them out of safety, but wont be distributing them.
Photocopies? Are they even worth anything?
I suppose that's for individuals to decide. Plenty of precedence though for photocopied works to hold value when the original piece is itself a photocopy. For instance, gobbledygook 1 and 2 by Kevin Eastman and Peter laird. 50 photocopy originals of each book. Sets of those sell between 5-10k. And there are certainly famous examples of artists who used copies as their medium. Warhol was a screen printer, etc etc.
This is awesome man! Do you have scans of the pages that you can share? I love this kind of stuff and thank you for sharing.
I thought about a way to do this responsibly... the problem is that most of the "originals" are photocopies. Were I to distribute the content digitally, I could inadvertantly create a market of fakes. I'm really uncomfortable with that.
I will be digitizing them out of safety, but wont be distributing them.
I'd really love to see a community effort that would provide a toold for people to archive secret stuff like this (e.g. 1 of a kind prototypes, or scans of documents like these) just to have a safe guard in place.
Something where the collectible is preserved forever, but completely encypted even from the site owner and the only way to view it is to have a keycode that can be sold *with* the collectible. Maybe even allow the new owner to change the code, or release it to the public at will.
This is awesome man! Do you have scans of the pages that you can share? I love this kind of stuff and thank you for sharing.
I thought about a way to do this responsibly... the problem is that most of the "originals" are photocopies. Were I to distribute the content digitally, I could inadvertantly create a market of fakes. I'm really uncomfortable with that.
I will be digitizing them out of safety, but wont be distributing them.
I'd really love to see a community effort that would provide a toold for people to archive secret stuff like this (e.g. 1 of a kind prototypes, or scans of documents like these) just to have a safe guard in place.
Something where the collectible is preserved forever, but completely encypted even from the site owner and the only way to view it is to have a keycode that can be sold *with* the collectible. Maybe even allow the new owner to change the code, or release it to the public at will.
I suppose I could put a a big copy watermark on the pages and distro that.
Theres also the time component though. I work full time and care for my kid and terminal wife. Scanning 500+ pages is a major time sink. Hell, just thr time to take each page in and out of its sleeve is going to be intense.
I'll figure something out.
They weren't "smuggled" out necessarily. Some were thrown in the trash so anyone talking about "legal repercussions" here is losing their mind. I have 3 binders all different just like these. They are very rare but I think every employee had their own idea of what happened with everything at Nintendo. I also have two Turbo Grafx Game Play Counselor binders which I think are even rarer than these.
"Smuggled them out" was the sellers word of choice. I don't know how ninja-like it actually was.
if you ever change your mind about sharing, i would LOVE to have some of this stuff.
Here is one pic.
Hey DreamTR, how many of these would you guesstimate are out there?