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Anyone have the details on how game magazines used to create their maps? I read somewhere that Nintendo Power used a Mac IIfx with a TV capture card, someone grabbing screens as another person played through the levels.

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I'm pretty sure that they just took photos of a TV (like a good PVM monitor, not a wood-grain cabinet Zenith), at least in the beginning. There's no doubt that these are photographs of a CRT:

http://www.superluigibros.com/images/media/nintendopower/1_s...

Reading that magazine was sometimes almost/more fun than playing the game -- you get all the art and logic without the frustration and sisyphean replay

If you look at the old player guides (the Super Mario World guide comes to mind) you'll actually find a couple mis-pastes where the image was laid out or cut badly before being photographed for the magazine.

It took a fair amount of work to only get pictures of the level's relevant features (and to always crop out the actual player).

Link to a couple good sources in this recent HN comment branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14929835

Sounds like Nintendo Power had a dedicated machine in Japan while some other magazines were stuck photographing CRT monitors.

If a IIfx was involved, that wasn't until many years down the road (given the release date of the NES and the IIfx).

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