Worlds of Power

The Worlds of Power books are a series of novelizations of video games for the Nintendo Entertainment System released in the early 1990s. The series was created by Seth Godin and take creative liberties with their source material. They usually include game hints written upside down at the end of chapters (some also had a tear-out "trading card" in the middle with a tip in mirror writing on the back) and are written in a simplistic, easy-to-read style.

Books in the series consist of novelizations of

Junior Edition Books

The producer of the series, Seth Godin, used the pen name "F.X. Nine." Godin said one day that when he talked to his nephew he discovered that the boy did not read for pleasure. Instead the boy played NES games. Godin decided to create books that appealed to children who played video games. Godin, the head of a book packaging company, created the series idea, selected games to novelize, found writers for the books, and contacted the publisher for approval. Nintendo negotiated with Godin but negotiations failed. The other video game creators successfully negotiated and Scholastic Books approved the project. 1up.com described Godin's role in publishing as "similar to that of a movie producer in the film industry."

The video game companies did not assist Godin as they were too busy. Godin set the production schedule, selected the video games, and selected the authors. Then he set to create one 40-page "bible" for each game outlining the plot, characters, and level layouts to assist the authors' creation of the dialog and narratives. 1up.com stated that assembling the bibles was "quite a challenge." Godin and the authors played through the games without strategy guides in order to reverse-engineer the stories. All of the books were indexed by Godin's pen name; Godin said that he chose the pen name due to the way bookstores arrange books as children looking for books related Nintendo would see Godin's books indexed by the letters "n-i-n." Godin said that his most serious frustration was playing video games for too long, as he would experience headaches. He added that the success of the Worlds of Power series outweighed the drawbacks; around one million copies of the books were sold. 1up.com added that this was "especially remarkable" as the target audience, young boys, were not considered to be a large market for book series. Godin said "We sold a million copies to kids that may not have read for fun before. That's a huge success (and) a home run!"

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Wikipedia