Random: Get Your Retro Fix With This Lovely Super Mario Themed Screensaver Set

These look better than the desktop My Nintendo rewards. At times like this, I wish Club Nintendo was still alive.

Those were the days. This reminds me of those shareware compilation CD-ROMs that were available in abundance in the 90s and often you'd never know what gems (and turds) you'd find in them. Compilation CD-ROMs were the equivalent of today's app store shovelware, and once in a while, you may find in them a demo of FIFA or Tomb Raider.

To think that people once paid big bucks for licensed screensavers.

See, Nintendo did do PC games.

I love it when people find stuff like this. Mostly because it's unexpected and it's a cool piece of history. Never knew something like this even existed until today.

@Silly_G I used to own a few of those shareware compilation CD-ROMs. I'd only ever buy them if there were enough titles on it that I didn't already have, which means I didn't have a whole lot since with only a few CDs you'd pretty much had everything. That, and the demo CD-ROMs on magazines were how I sometimes determined if I wanted to buy a game back then.

Ahh! I remember a Pokemon set I had for this from 2000. It contained the music video (in like maybe 240p..maybe), screensavers, and wall paper. My computer could barely handle it!

@OfNullAndVoid : PC gaming magazines with their included disc(s) full of demos were always so thrilling, but I never had a computer current enough to be able to run them.

@Silly_G Play station and Xbox magazines back in the day included demos.

Surprisingly Nintendo Power didn't with the GC.

Hurray for digital historians and archivists!

This is very lovely

@GyroZeppeli I was so sad when I had to say "Goodbye Jojo" to Club Nintendo. Their rewards were so much better than Mynintendo.

@GyroZeppeli Sometimes?

Man that disc looks legit, right? 😅

I wonder what the quality of the actual screensavers were like though. Given that it's a Windows program in 1997, chances are it was shovelware. Most screensavers back then were poorly-made shareware.

@ReaderRagfihs Marine Aquarium 3.

Still use it to this day. Not because it's any kind of useful, but just because I like sea life.

I have installed Windows 3.11 inside DosBox a few months ago so I tried this out.

Everything actually works with an English version of Windows, it just displays random characters instead of Japanese text.

D:\install.exe seems to install the screensavers but I couldn't figure out the install program.

D:\OMAKE\install.exe installs the calculator, clock and a program that changes the desktop background. Those work well and contain barely any Japanese text. Now my Windows 3.11 has a Princess Peach background
Or was she still called Toadstool at that point?

Anyone still remember the 2002 Nintendo Preview DVD?


It had game videos, wallpapers AND screensavers on the disc.
Still have one. Don't even remember how I came by it, though...

@Silly_G Ha! I certainly remember those times. My PC was also always lagging behind whatever was on those discs, and by the time that
I actually DID have a PC that could run them, the games were actually already far too old for me to bother installing them.

@Trajan GameCube did not have any (official) demo discs (edit: that came with magazines), but Cube Magazine did come with a set of 2 discs every month: one was a video DVD, with the latest GameCube game trailers, and the other was a CodeJunkies disc, with cheat codes for GameCube games.

I still own 12 sets of these. Strangely enough, they also put the videos on a GameCube-sized disc, even though you couldn't actually play them in a GameCube, so you had to put them in a PC or standard DVD player.

@ReaderRagfihs I know, that's also why I said no official demo discs came with any magazine. Nintendo never allowed that. The official demo discs only ended up in game stores and toy shops, if they had a GameCube demo booth. (edit: well, at least, that was the situation over here)

But a friend of mine worked in a game shop, so ultimately,
I actually ended up receiving several of these demo discs...

I remember Game in the UK gave away demo discs for Rogue Squadron:rebel strike for GC at one point.

@Trajan : Producing demo discs for the GameCube for Nintendo Power magazine would have been difficult because the discs were a proprietary format (and would likely take longer to manufacture as Nintendo were the only ones making them), and the discs were based on the mini DVD standard, having a maximum capacity of only 1.4GB (compared to 4.7GB of a single-layer DVD or 8.5GB dual-layer), so, there would not have been much room to pack the discs full of demos.

While I am aware of some games requiring multiple discs, were any GameCube games shipped on dual-layer discs? (if such GameCube discs existed, then they would have had a maximum capacity of 2.8GB).

@Silly_G The whole proprietary disc thing does make me wonder why those CodeJunkies cheat discs actually did work, since they weren't in any kind of proprietary format. You can even read the data on a PC.

@ReaderRagfihs I have a Rogue Squadron 3 demo disc that has the original Star Wars arcade game included

@Silly_G 1.5gb was fine for some demos. They just had to include a level or what not. Its also not like a ton of games were coming out for GC.

@ThanosReXXX yeah I had the preview did. No idea if I still have it. Probably not.

@GyroZeppeli: A lot of us do. Club Nintendo was much better in rewards, and easier to have access to those rewards. By contrast, I barely ever get gold points/coins, so what's the point in checking out rewards?

@KingdomHeartsFan: I also love that art style for the Super Mario games. The current art style used for the series, I'm not the biggest fan of, though it works for what it is. It's nice, but I prefer this art style.

@Ryu_Niiyama: Actually, Nintendo licensed their ip to be used in various software, such as Mario's Printing World, Mario Teaches Typing 1/2, and any others.

@countzero: Peach has always been her name. Toadstool was her name here in America, and probably Europe. The Super Nes game, Yoshi's Safari, was the first here in America to call her Peach. Super Mario 64 was the second, but more noticeable instance of the name change.

@ThanosReXXX: I remember it, and I had it. A shame Nintendo doesn't do stuff like this now.

@Everyone_Else: These remind me of a N64 screenshot, and video clip disc that Nintendo once sold. I forget if the media was floppy, or the proprietary Iomega Zip format. Nintendo needs to start releasing cds, and digital downloads of their games' music. I can go in to Target, Walmart, Best Buy, or Gamestop, and there is non-video game merchandise, that is based on games. Nintendo needs to tap into that more, as a means to make profit. Granted, they already do it, but I'm talking about just doing that a little bit more.

@Capt_N ? It was a joke.

Interesting. Thats pretty cool.

@KingdomHeartsFan ???

@ReaderRagfihs I'll just leave this here...
https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/flying-toasters.html

You can easily recreate most of these things nowadays, thanks to websites like Spriters Resource.