Ancient Web: Flying Omelette Scanned Kid Icarus Paper Ephemera

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A game cartridge does not tell the entire story of a video game. There were instruction booklets, magazine maps, advertisements, comics, and little trading cards that could disappear long before the game itself became collectible.

Visit Flying Omelette's Kid Icarus Scans.

Flying Omelette is already represented in the Ancient Web Collection as a long-running gaming website. This subsection has a more specific mission: preserve the paper and printed material surrounding Nintendo's Kid Icarus and its Game Boy sequel, Of Myths & Monsters.

A collection with the scanner still visible

The scan index begins with American and Asian NES cartridge artwork and a Game Boy cartridge. The author credits a reader named Sloppy Joe for helping locate one variant through an eBay auction. That tiny acknowledgement makes this a collaborative collector's record rather than a manufacturer-issued reference.

Next come the NES manual scans, arranged spread by spread from the cover through its thirty-odd pages. The index separately offers the entire manual in PDF form. Another section scans the Game Boy sequel's manual, including controller instructions, the character roster, maps, and an explanation of its sacred treasures.

There is far more than instruction text. The author also scanned a Nintendo Power four-page review of the Game Boy game, a two-page Nester's Adventures comic, a page of passwords, and collectible cards mailed to magazine subscribers.

The notes capture practical preservation problems. The author says an original GeoCities version of the shrine could not host the entire comic because of file-size limits. An old magazine spread was difficult to flatten without damaging the book. The shiny gold printing on a special trading card did not reproduce accurately on the scanner. Those are firsthand details about how amateur archives were made.

The larger Kid Icarus shrine links enemies, items, music, levels, codes, fan art, and screenshots. The scans belong to that ecosystem, but they preserve physical gaming culture that a ROM image does not.

These scans are historical reference material, not a statement that Nintendo's original publication rights have expired. The page makes sense as evidence of a fan taking time to document objects that are easy to lose.

Browse the original magazine and manual index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.