Nintendo World Championships Brings a Form of esports to Everyone

The genesis of esports as we know it today can be traced back to Nintendo, all the way to the NES era. In fact, prior to the first ever Nintendo World Championships, which took place across multiple locations in North America in 1990, an infamous cult-classic film The Wizard (1989) presented the very idea of it as a silly fantasy of sorts. As cringeworthy and absurd as the film was, the notion of esports did manage to materialize, all thanks to Nintendo's foundational classics on the NES.

Where games prior to the NES were all about getting a high score, level-to-level progression in NES titles inadvertently, perhaps even unintentionally, brought out a different style of competition: completing games as quickly as possible. Speed running may have become a culture with the advent of YouTube and later Twitch, but it was always in the heart of gamers all over, enough to become the very basis of the inaugural Nintendo World Championships back in 1990.

It still baffles most gamers that the notion of speed platforming wasn't a Sonic thing at all, it was always a Mario thing. When you think about the core level design and the many, many shortcuts found in Super Mario Bros., it's clear that completing the game quickly was always the intention underlying its game design.

Still, to turn NES games into an esports-grade competition, there had to be something more bite-sized than simply watching someone complete a full-length adventure. The challenges in the original tournament were just such bite-sized affairs, generally involving completing a certain task or objective in record time. For example, one of the core challenges in the inaugural tournament in 1990 was to collect a set number of coins as quickly as possible.

The tournament itself used special NES cartridges that were never released to the public, and these special Nintendo World Championship cartridges remain the holy grail of Nintendo collecting. These cost a small fortune and will always remain an elusive curiosity. Thankfully there are other ways to experience the thrill of this competition without spending a small fortune on an obscure NES cartridge, as the latest release on Nintendo Switch is a reimagining of that very concept for a modern gaming audience.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition serves fine as a collection of mini-games based on some heavy hitters from the NES library. These bite-sized renditions are largely similar to the NES Remix releases on Nintendo Wii U and 3DS back in the day. They're all packaged into this online hub with a multitude of daily challenges and tournaments, with as many as 200,000 players active at any given time. It's a concept that probably could have functioned as a free-to-play release for Switch Online, but even as a standalone package the nostalgia of retro esports shines through with plenty of couch multi-player shenanigans for those rare in-person get-togethers. The deliberate subtitle of 'NES Edition' may be a promising foreshadowing of bigger things to come. SNES Edition or perhaps even a N64 Edition? Looking at the SNES as an example, a game like Donkey Kong Country would be a perfect fit for this sort of interpretation, imagine the infamous mine-cart stage presented as an intense time-attack. Hopefully the NES Edition will maintain enough sales and player base momentum to pave the way for the SNES Edition.

Now to be clear, back then and even now, esports and competitive gaming were never part of the original blueprint of these NES titles when they were being conceived in Nintendo HQ. It was largely the shrewd observation that Nintendo higher-ups would have made when these games unintentionally created a competitive subculture in North America (especially via reader responses and participation in Nintendo Power) that then almost accidentally created this concept of a Nintendo esports event. Competitive gaming wasn't a huge part of Japanese gaming in the early days. In fact, most would be amazed to learn that two-player competitive play was almost left out of Street Fighter! Imagine a world without competitive Street Fighter or the fighting game community we have today.

Where fighting games became a natural fit for esports, it's hard to consistently make the same case for NES games, or most Nintendo console experiences for that matter. And so, Nintendo World Championships feels like a palette cleanser of 13 NES hits presented as time-bound mini-games. Some games work better than others: the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. and its sequels are perhaps the best fit for this template. Excitebike was practically built for this environment, a game that's easy to pick up and play but quite steep to master, and so the challenges designed for that particular title actually end up providing valuable training for anyone looking (or hoping!) to set records in the dirtbike racing classic. Similarly, the other arcade-style classics like Donkey Kong translate nicely into short bursts of gameplay. A lot of these titles always carried a sense of urgency of wanting to complete them as quickly as possible, and they still naturally feel this way even when played today, so these are naturally the best titles to feature in Nintendo World Championships.

However, not all of the NES titles presented in this package translate logically into short mini-games. Titles like Kirby's Adventure, Metroid, and especially The Legend of Zelda were always meant to be slow-burn experiences. While deriving time-attack tasks out of these adventures is no doubt interesting, they are by no means indicative of what these experiences are actually about. If anything, these mini-games may even misrepresent the core design principles and intent of these epic single-player titles, especially to those exploring the library for the first time. They're interesting challenges for sure, but absolutely not the best representation of the respective game design and gameplay sensibilities.

This brings up another important point: Nintendo World Championships on Switch isn't a representative collection of NES classics, and the audience for this game is not going to be NES newcomers, but rather the audience is largely going to be aging NES veterans looking for a new spin on their childhood favorites, and to be able to rediscover their favorites to play and relive as a community. The active online community is no doubt a huge draw, but for older players who are looking to reconnect with their childhood in a clever way, the Switch release also offers local multiplayer as well. As for someone who is completely unaware of the NES games or has never played them before, then those players should start elsewhere, something like the Nintendo Switch Online curation of NES games.

Will classic Nintendo games ever attract esports players from all over the world to fill a convention center? Probably not and that was never going to be the intention. Unless Nintendo somehow curates enough fighting games (not called Super Smash Bros.) to create their own tournament, or perhaps modify Splatoon into the next LAN network extravaganza. It's an unlikely scenario, but right now there are 200,000 or so players trying their best to catch the Mushroom in record time.