This Week in Retro: The Nintendo World Championships (Patreon)

March 8, 1990: Nintendo Writes Itself into eSports History with the Nintendo World Championships

by Diamond Feit

In a lot of ways, I do not envy the children of the 21st century. Kids today are born into a de facto surveillance state, photographed while inside the womb, with their every actions recorded and reported on by well-meaning parents. With an infinite array of media available to them at all times, the days of bonding with classmates over the one show everyone's watching and discussing on the schoolyard are long gone. And once they come of age, social media is waiting for them, ready to capture their worst idle thoughts and preserve them for eternity.

However, a child today who likes video games has no idea how fortunate they are to live in the internet age. In the distant past of the ’80s and ’90s, kids had only one resource for learning about new releases in advance: Print advertisements. Most of these featured artwork or weird photos designed to catch the eye by representing the game, with only a microscopic screenshot of the actual game in the corner if you were lucky. There was also Nintendo Power, an entire magazine of advertisements, which tended to focus a bit more on the content of the games themselves, yet which still offered a limited perspective.

I was living in this frustrated state when I learned—from a print advertisement, naturally—of the Nintendo World Championships: A national tour of the United States in which visitors would be able to play dozens of NES games. Both new and even unreleased games, at that. Of course, in 1990, there was little distinction between those two descriptors, since games lacked concrete release dates in most cases. If a game had come out in February 1990 but I hadn't seen it or played it in April 1990, it might as well not exist. This would be my chance, in a single afternoon, to open my eyes wide and take in all the NES games my fingers could stand to play, to learn in a day more about the NES than a year's worth of magazines could tell me. I'm sure I had to plead with a parent to take me all the way to The Meadowlands in New Jersey, and bless their heart for caving to my demands. The experience was better than I could have hoped for.

Try to imagine a child whose only opportunity to experience new games came from visiting a friend's house, happening upon an in-store display, or renting a random title. Now imagine that child walking into the largest building they have ever seen and seeing scores of NES games in every direction, all free to play, most of them games they had never even heard of. That's a snapshot of my life the day I went to the Nintendo World Championships. To an extent, my excitement that day was easy to understand: Child likes video games, receives access to video games, experiences joy. But the nature of this visit was unique. By having so many games in one place with no quarters needed, this was a rare occasion when children could play absolutely anything they wanted just to see what it was. Even the weirdest arcade games required money* up front, but the Nintendo World Championships was a buffet of wonders.

*In hindsight I'm sure whichever adult escorted me to this event had to pay a significant fee for me to gain access to these games, but at that age, anything an adult pays for is essentially free.

I wish I had kept a journal or taken pictures of the event, but the only record of my day exists in my aging head. I am positive my visit to the Nintendo World Championships was my first chance to play Dr. Mario and Little Nemo The Dream Master, games I would have been drawn towards in any situation. But I can also recall discovering a strange soccer game that looked like River City Ransom and having a wonderful time playing it with a complete stranger. I never was much for sports games (despite enjoying sports), so that game was definitely one I never would have sought out to play under any other circumstances. I doubt it was in stores at the time, so I didn't know what it was called, and had no way to find it once I left the arena (Google enables me to now tell you it was called Nintendo World Cup outside Japan).

While the vast array of games on display are what I remember most, the lasting legacy of the Nintendo World Championships is the titular tournament. Gamers of all ages (broken down into three categories) were invited to compete in a trio of NES games: Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris, all combined on a single exclusive cartridge. The challenge was score-based as those titles lack any head-to-head modes, a far cry from EVO or most other modern competitions, but Nintendo's national tour would have been most childrens' first real-life taste of what we now call esports. Adding to the legacy was Nintendo's decision to give away a small number of those challenge cartridges, thus creating a rare collectible that creates headlines whenever one changes hands.

In 2020, there is little about the Nintendo World Championships that seems remarkable. The Internet enables all of us to be hyper-aware of what games exist and when they will be on sale, and it even delivers them to our doors/consoles. Online play means every console or PC owner is seconds away from being humiliated in their favorite games by a profanity-wielding pre-teen. Streaming video enables competitions both big and small to have a global audience, and the proliferation of conventions makes a room full of new video games a common experience.

However, last summer I caught a glimpse of that magic again when I happened to be on vacation in Seattle and I stumbled across the Nintendo Switch Road Trip’s big red truck. My children and I were able to play a selection of Switch games, and despite their familiarity with downloadable demos and trailers, I could still see their excitement to be participating in a live event. I don't know if they'll hold fond memories of that day for decades the way I recall the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, but I know that I will hold memories of those two distinct experiences side-by-side in my heart as evidence that video games are timeless treasures.