Fresh Find: The 1992 Merlin Nintendo Sticker Album

This arrival is the companion to a piece already in the collection, and one of the most colourful things on its shelves. Merlin's 1992 Nintendo sticker album was a big hit with young collectors, a book to be filled, sticker by hard-won sticker, with the heroes of the day.

A completed sticker album is a small triumph of childhood persistence.

What It Is

The album held two hundred and seventy-four stickers featuring motifs from popular Nintendo NES and Game Boy games, Super Mario Land and Mario Tennis on the Game Boy, and The Legend of Zelda on the NES, among many others. Like all sticker albums, it was designed to send children hunting, swapping and pestering for the ones they lacked, and a fully completed book is a small triumph of childhood persistence. Today it is a coveted collector's item and one of the brightest, most nostalgic publications in the collection.

Why It Joined the Collection

The album pairs directly with the Merlin sticker collection already documented here, completing a little Merlin cluster from the same 1992 licensing wave. Publications like this are precious precisely because they were treated as disposable and, once filled, easily discarded, so an intact example carries real charm and rarity. It captures a very particular flavour of the era, the Game Boy as playground currency, and keeping it preserves the softer, paper-and-glue side of the console's cultural footprint.

274 stickers of NES and Game Boy heroes, one hard-won book to fill them.

The Merlin sticker album is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.