My wife and I attended the 2009 VGXPO event in Philadelphia, and, at the event we purchased a copy of the Nintendo DS game Sangokushi Taisen. We very much enjoyed this arcade game by SEGA in which you collect cards that place characters onto a field for strategic battles, and jumped at the chance to own a version of the game.
The cover of the Diamond Publishing Nintendo sticker album as uploaded by dizzzy to archive.org
The unintended bonus of this, though, was there was a pack of Diamond Publishing Nintendo stickers inside the case. I had forgotten about this for years, but came across the game while cleaning up areas of my gaming room Thursday. Since there is no real point in keeping it sealed up, I decided to open the pack and see what was inside.
I posted about the pack on Twitter, and one of my followers told me this was part of an album series. You bought a magazine-style album for 59 cents and then placed these stickers in the assigned spots in the album. This series consisted of 150 stickers, and each sticker pack provided six stickers at a time.
I never recall seeing this album series growing up, but it is very reminiscent of a similar album I had featuring National Football League players. This was likely even in 1989 because I distinctly remember the feature in the album about Super Bowl XXIII between the Bengals and 49ers. Each time we went to the supermarket, my mother would give me a dollar and that let me purchase three packs of the stickers.
The bonus of this Nintendo album, however, was in a cellophane panel that could be held over red patterns on the stickers and in the albums to be able to read extra content and play a variety of games. The middle of the album also features a collection of panels that could be assembled to create a board game that you could play by flipping a coin to move across the spaces.
I opened my pack and got one enemy character from each of the games featured in the album – Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2 and The Legend of Zelda – along with three pieces for the board game. I don’t own the album, and there isn’t much I can do with the stickers, but it was still exciting to open up a slice of 1989.
It’s a bit reminiscent of begging my mother for the Nintendo-branded cereal. It was a decent cereal, but the real adventure was in the packaging and reading everything on the box. Through reading the Nintendo cereal box, I found out about the glitch in The Legend of Zelda that turns the game black and white if you blow the whistle at the moment a bomb explodes … that really doesn’t do anything, but it’s a fun trick that I think few people know about.
I recorded a short video that shows me opening the pack and revealing what I found inside:
GemuBaka 
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