Game #9: Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll (1989)

I had a subscription to Nintendo Power when I was younger, and I am fully prepared to attribute my voracious readership in that time period to it. So hardy was my thirst for video game-themed literature that I kept right on begging for low-rent video game magazines at the supermarket.

To be honest, I can’t even remember what these were called and the only thing springing to mind is a giant stone head being on the front of one issue. I think it was a story about Amagon, but I digress. These magazines had actual ads in them that were a lot less subtle than Nintendo Power because the entire magazine is an ad.

Since Nintendo only lasted from 1985 to 1993 (1994 had only 13 games), and there are roughly 800 Nintendo games total, there was no way in hell Nintendo Power was going to cover 84 games a month, and this isn’t even taking into account the diminishing Nintendo coverage when Super Nintendo came out. For the games unworthy of the pages of “the Power,” there were these crappy b-rate magazines.

My friend Adam and I pored over these generic magazines together and saw a ton of ads for Flying Dragon. It looked awesome. However, it wasn't anywhere to be found in Nintendo Power. We were so convinced that Nintendo Power had missed a gem in Flying Dragon that we spent a long time tracking it down. No store ever had it for rent, and between our local drug store and Radio Shack, nowhere had it for purchase. Needless to say, we were growing impatient with our local rental outposts for not having it. We were such Nintendo connoisseurs that we thought we knew what was best for “our stores;” we would constantly call them up and ask if they had Flying Dragon, sometimes going so far as to disguise our voices. There’s no way the stores didn’t know that we were doing that, and they probably laughed their asses off after they hung up.

Either way, Adam finally sacked up and bought a copy, and by that I mean he snagged it from Kay Bee Toys in Eureka on his parents’ dime. He spent some time playing it in secret before inviting me over and when I got there, I was disappointed because it sucked. Nintendo Power was right, and the crappy Safeway magazines were wrong. It was then that I realized that advertisers are not to be trusted. Of course this rings true today but back then, you only had the crooked words of slippery ad-men to hang onto. Video games back then were expensive (sixty bucks a cartridge in the ‘80s) and in order to sell those games, they had to downright deceive the kids. In fact, Flying Dragon may have the most deceptive box art I’ve ever seen. It sure looks like the funnest, most badass game ever, but it’s borderline unplayable. I mean seriously, look at this:

I dodged a bullet when Adam got that game. Money was becoming scarcer in my house and I had Christmas coming up. I can’t remember what I got for Christmas of 1989 but there’s a very strong chance that it was better than Flying Dragon.