Nester
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Nester (in Pilotwings 64, "Lark") was the long-time teenage mascot and comic strip star of Nintendo Power magazine, as well as a sometime video game character. His name is a play on the acronym NES, Nintendo's flagship system during the time period.
Nester was created by Howard Philips, "President" of the Nintendo Fun Club and an editor of Nintendo Power, to be the supporting character in his comic strip (though not actually drawn by Philips), Howard & Nester. (The Howard of the title is a cartoon representation of Philips.) The comic strips generally advertised new games, often by dream sequences where Nester was actually a given video game character. In various strips, Nester has been Mega Man, Simon Belmont, Link, the Lone Ranger, the main character of Dragon Warrior, and many other characters. He has also met the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Scrooge McDuck, Luke Skywalker, The Tasmanian Devil, and Bill and Lance from the Contra series. In addition, the name "Nester" was almost always used in screenshots for games where the player named their character during the strip's run.
From 1989 to 1993 The Nintendo Power Awards (Nintendo's yearly reader-selected list of the best video games) featured Nester-shaped trophies and were referred to in the magazine as the "Nesters" as a reference to the Oscars.
In the early 1990s the real-life Philips left the company for JVC. Though Nester stayed in the strip, now retitled Nester's Adventures, he was gradually phased out as mascot in favor of Mario, already a more general Nintendo mascot. Nester's Adventures ended in Volume 55 (December 1993). Notably, a few issues following the name change (to be more exact, in November 1991), Nester aged from the pint-sized kid he originally appeared as to a fully-grown teenager, and would remain this way for the rest of the comic's run.
A short tribute to Nester, now as a college student, appeared in Nintendo Power issue #100.
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[edit] Comic strip
The first Howard and Nester strip features Howard Phillips introducing "my good friend, Nester." It is soon clear, however, that Nester does not return Howard's fondness for him and in fact seems to be resentful of Howard's intelligence and gaming prowess. Within three issues, the strip had developed a reliable formula, which it would keep for its entire run: each strip began with Howard and Nester inside the world of a recent Nintendo game (typically a game that had gotten a feature review in the previous issue). The duo would run into a problem, usually one that was also present in the actual game, and the egotistical Nester would come up with a plan by which he would solve the problem and one-up Howard in the process. Howard would then politely point out a flaw in Nester's plan and offer an alternative (which usually came in the form of a tip for the game in question; since Nintendo Power had a strong focus toward game strategies at the time, it was required that every H&N strip contain at least one game tip.) Nester would dismiss Howard's plan (and usually hurl an insult at Howard in the process) and then proceed to implement his own plan, which would fail miserably. The strips usually ended with Nester humiliated by his own hand and Howard inadvertently triumphant. Despite his unbroken losing streak, however, Nester never truly admitted defeat.
An important element of the strip was that Howard was not aware of Nester's animosity towards him. Any sort of competition between the two existed entirely in Nester's mind, which just added to the humor when Howard would invariably win without even realizing he was competing with Nester.
When Howard Phillips left Nintendo, his likeness was dropped from the comic, and it became Nester's Adventures. At first, the stories took place "back in the real world," featuring Nester involved in real-life situations which only had vague connections to video games. This format was soon dropped and Nester, now growing from a child to a teenager, found himself back in the game world again. The formula changed as well - now, without Howard to compete with, Nester was more of a smart-aleck, sometimes berating characters from the games he appeared before dropping a hint for the game in question. Nester's Adventures was soon cut down from two pages to one in 1992, before being canceled altogether after 1993.
[edit] List of games featured in Nester's comic strip
[edit] Howard and Nester
- Volume 1 - N/A (the tip is for The Legend Of Zelda, but the game appears only as Nester is playing it)
- Volume 2 - N/A (the tip is for Super Mario Bros. 2, but the strip does not focus on a single game)
- Volume 3 - Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
- Volume 4 - Track and Field II
- Volume 5 - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
- Volume 6 - Ninja Gaiden
- Volume 7 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- Volume 8 - Mega Man II
- Volume 9 - DuckTales
- Volume 10 - Dragon Warrior
- Volume 11 - Super Spike V'Ball
- Volume 12 - Super Mario Bros. 3
- Volume 14 - Super C
- Volume 16 - Golgo 13: The Mafat Conspiracy
- Volume 18 - Maniac Mansion
- Volume 20 - Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship
- Volume 21 - Mega Man III
- Volume 22 - StarTropics
- Volume 23 - Deja Vu: a Nightmare Comes True
- Volume 24 - Monopoly
- Volume 25 - The Lone Ranger
[edit] Nester's Adventures
- Volume 26 - The Hunt for Red October
- Volume 27 - Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
- Volume 28 - Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
- Volume 29 - Star Wars
- Volume 30 - F-Zero
- Volume 31 - Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters
- Volume 32 - ActRaiser
- Volume 33 - Super CastleVania IV
- Volume 34 - Rampart
- Volume 35 - The Addams Family
- Volume 36 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
- Volume 37 - Robocop
- Volume 38 - Dragon Strike
- Volume 39 - Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
- Volume 40 - Wings II
- Volume 41 - Prince of Persia
- Volume 42 - Out of This World
- Volume 43 - Super Star Wars
- Volume 44 - Desert Strike
- Volume 45 - Sonic Blastman
- Volume 46 - Wing Commander
- Volume 47 - Star Fox
- Volume 48 - Mech Warrior
- Volume 49 - Batman Returns
- Volume 50 - Taz-Mania
- Volume 51 - The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
- Volume 52 - Zombies Ate My Neighbors
- Volume 53 - Rock 'n Roll Racing
- Volume 54 - Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
- Volume 55 - Jurassic Park
[edit] Other appearances
Aside from Nintendo Power, Nester appeared in various other Nintendo products.
- In 1990 Nester appeared as a townsperson in the NES game Dragon Warrior. This townsperson looked identical to most other townspeople in the game, but identified himself as Nester. When spoken to, he commented that he was lost but then immediately claimed that he wasn't - a reference to Nester's own ineptitude as a game player as well as his self-assured nature. There is also a townsperson named Howard. On a side note, neither Nester nor Howard appeared in the later re-release of Dragon Warrior on the Game Boy Color.
- Also, he is made mention of in the NES game, StarTropics. If you talk to a fisherman named Hook in Chapter 5 and then say no to his advice, he asks "Is your name Nester?"
- In 1996 Nester appeared in Nester's Funky Bowling for the ill-fated Virtual Boy. The game also introduced his evil brother Lester and his good sister Hester.
- Also in 1996 Nester, under the name Lark, appeared as a playable character in Pilotwings 64 for the Nintendo 64. Nintendo Power later revealed that the two were the same character.
- Because of his popularity as a Nintendo icon, a NES emulator was named Nester (and NesterDC when it was ported to the Sega Dreamcast) after the character.
- At the end of The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl Linus makes a drawing with Nester's head
