Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition’s lack of strong competitive modes makes for a fun but lacking introduction to video game speedrunning.
My hands are dripping with sweat. I’m not sure if it’s from the 90-degree summer heat or if that’s just the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I’m determined to set a personal record. I take control of a pixelated Mario and run hurtling to the familiar row of item boxes that greet players at the beginning of Super Mario Bros. I hop over a Goomba, hit a box to unleash a mushroom and jump to it. I’m fast, but not fast enough. Reset. This time I mistime my jump and hit the wrong box. Reset. I slide a few pixels too far and lose my momentum. Reset. It takes dozens of tries, but I eventually lock in. I hit my first and second jumps perfectly, run left, hop on top of the boxes with my momentum, and nab the roaming fungus.
I’ve done it. I’ve beaten my previous record by .1 second. Now I’m cheering like I’ve just won an Olympic medal.
It may sound silly, but that’s the thrill that Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition delivers to those willing to fully commit to it. The microgame collection turns 13 NES classics into a series of bite-sized speed challenges that encourage players to get intimately familiar with how old games were designed and the nuances that make each one special. It’s a great playable history lesson, though one that struggles to translate obsessive single-player fun into competitive modes that live up to its namesake event.The joys of speed
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition has a bit of a misleading title. You might think that you’re getting a faithful re-creation of the actual Nintendo World Championships series, a live competition that first took place in 1990. That’s not really the case. The real event had players competing to set high scores in modified versions of Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris playing off a special NES cartridge built for the event. This collection more so turns Nintendo’s most iconic first-party NES games into around 150 short speed challenges that take anywhere from two seconds to seven minutes to complete. It would be more accurate to call it NES Remix 3, but without the actual “remix” part.
I’m initially disappointed when I first boot it up. It’s not so much that it doesn’t match the real event. It’s more that it doesn’t do much of anything to celebrate it beyond a short splash screen explaining what it was briefly. It’s lacking as a historical document, and that does cut into the appeal at first. Without context on the real competition, like archival footage driving home how tense the event was, it’s hard for me to find much motivation at first as I work through some simple challenges from games I’ve played hundreds of times.
That changed faster than I expected. Once it got its hooks in me, I couldn’t stop.
The core of the experience is in Speedrun mode, where players can freely play every minigame and try to set their best time. The collection pulls challenges from 13 games, including Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Excitebike, and every 2D Mario platformer from the NES era (including The Lost Levels). It’s a great spread of classics that gives underappreciated gems like Balloon Fight and Kid Icarus time to shine. The challenges mount in complexity as I play, split up by difficulty ranks. Sometimes all I need to do is inhale an enemy in Kirby’s Adventure, a task that takes seconds. Other times, I have to clear an entire level of it. The bite-sized nature of those challenges makes it easy to replay them over and over in search of perfection.
