Ever since its founding, the non-profit museum Art of Nintendo Power has been busy cataloguing the art and history of the popular Nintendo magazine Nintendo Power, as well as documenting the work of Nintendo's Game Play Counsellors. However, it recently grabbed our attention (over the weekend), thanks to an unusual tweet it posted about a custom NES zapper that had been donated to the museum.
Unlike the original zapper, this customized version bizarrely features its sensor on top (as opposed to inside), with someone having obviously gone to the effort to mod it, in order to improve its accuracy. According to Art of Nintendo Power's tweet, it was a donation from the folks behind the retailer Pink Gorilla, who were told that it had belonged to an ex-Nintendo Game Play Counsellor in the past.
The museum's owner Stephan Reese, therefore, set out to find the person it had originally belonged to through his network of connections and was eventually successful in tracking the person down. Speaking to the Counsellor in question, he asked them to confirm whether they had used it at work, to which they replied:
"100% yes. Who has time to miss??? A fair amount of GPC work was trying to play as many different games as possible, so lingering on a Zapper game was counterproductive."
It's a fascinating piece of history and will now join the rest Art of Nintendo Power's Game Play Counsellor Archive, alongside maps for NES games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, bespoke jackets worn by Nintendo's counsellors, and hours of vintage footage.