Topps Zelda Cards

In the year 1989 Topps, the company best known for their sports cards, released two sets of cards based on popular Nintendo games. These games were Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros, and of course The Legend of Zelda.
Now, many years ago, I was shopping at a local used game store called Game Swap and they had several boxes of these cards. And they were still in their original wrapping which is even more incredible. I was a big Nintendo fan and they were only 50 cents a pack so I picked up 2 packs just for fun. Inside I got 2 Zelda cards and 1 Zelda sticker which you can see below.
Legend of Zelda card
Adventure of Link card
Now for the interesting part. As you can see, each card as several scratch off sections. These cards were actually part of a game. By collecting all of the cards of a series people were able to scratch off the sections. If 3 swords were scratched off then Link was allowed to continue to the next screen. However, if 3 fireballs were revealed then you lost.

Each pack of cards also had a couple of collectible stickers inside. One the back of each sticker was a tip or piece of advice for a popular Nintendo game at the time. Here is one of the Zelda stickers that I own.
Legend of Zelda sticker