Topps Nintendo Cards

In 1989, Topps was commission to produce a series of Nintendo-themed cards. The end product was named Nintendo Game Packs and consisted of 60 scratch off cards and 33 collectible stickers.

Featured Game Series
The Nintendo Game Packs focused on 6 popular Nintendo Entertainment System games of the time. The following is a list of those games





The Legend of Zelda

The Adventure of Link

Double Dragon

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

Despite the focus on four different game series, it should be noted that only Mario and Legend of Zelda characters would appear on the retail boxes and card packages.

Scratch-off Card Game
The main focus of the Nintendo Game Packs was the 60 unique scratch-off cards. Each pack consisted of 5 cards and would hold 3 scratch-off cards and 2 stickers. For each game there are 10 cards one would have to acquire in order to play the scratch-off game. The cards would be marked as being Screen 1-10 signifying their proper order.

The set of 10 cards per game would loosely follow the plot of their respective games and would feature official art and scenery of those games. Each card would then have around 10-20 scratch-off locations. To proceed to the next screen, or card, the player would have to reveal 3 symbols defined for each game. For the Legend of Zelda sets, the symbol was a slashed sword. However, if 3 enemy symbols were revealed then the gamer technically lost and would have to try to collect that card once more to try again.

Stickers
Each pack of the Nintendo Game Packs would contain 2 stickers which would generally include a piece of official art with a catchy slogan of some kind. For example, one has a picture of Link from The Legend of Zelda and includes the caption, "Win With Link."

On the back of each sticker was a hint to one of the 6 games featured by the Nintendo Game Packs.