The 1989 film The Wizard had a profound effect on me as a child. In it, the young Fred Savage character makes his way to the Nintendo World Championships in, hell, I don’t even remember which city, but it was somewhere far away to put his video game skills to the test. Anyway, once he gets there, a big twist in the event is that he’s competing in the then-unreleased Super Mario Bros. 3. And boy oh boy did this product work to perfection – me there was to have Super Mario Bros. 3 the moment it came out after that, and god bless my mom, she bought it for me. She pulled it out of that white plastic K-Mart grocery bag and just handed it to me – it wasn’t even my birthday or anything! – is a major memory for me.
That’s what I think of when I think of the Nintendo World Championships, but for others, the real-life competition was much more than just that: a real-life competition. Now Nintendo is putting a creative twist on the nostalgia of its own story in a way that only they seem to be really good at: by turning it into a local and online multiplayer game for the Nintendo Switch that plays in sub-two-second increments (this is no joke ) up to about a minute at most.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition includes 13 games: Super Mario Bros. 1-3, Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels, Zelda 1 and 2, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Donkey Kong, Ballon Fight, Excitebike, Ice Climber and Kirby’s Adventure. I ended up dealing with each of them during a 90-minute hands-on session in both solo modes and the local party mode. I certainly knew what I was getting into – a collection of classic NES games from my childhood turned into racing challenges – but I didn’t expect the format to be so much entertainment.
Of those games, Kirby’s Adventure was the only one I hadn’t played at all as a kid, and it was certainly Kirby’s challenges that tripped me up the most. But other than that, I had an absolute blast trying to earn an S rank for the myriad of challenges offered for each game. They get progressively harder as you progress, naturally, and you have to unlock the harder ones with coins you earn by getting a good ranking on the challenges you have access to.
As an example, the first challenge from The Legend of Zelda is so simple it probably sounds silly: you start at the beginning of the game and you have to enter the cave that is on the first screen and get the sword. Still, I found myself replaying it a few times to try and save tenths of a second off my time and get that pride-inflating S ranking.
Party mode is where it really got fun. IGN’s Rebecca Valentine and I competed in a series of party mode challenges against Nintendo representatives. We went through World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. 3. We got the first energy ball in Metroid. We climbed to the top of the first stage in Donkey Kong, took a lap around the track in Excitebike, and more. Is it the perfect recreation of an in-person race with hundreds if not thousands of people cheering you on? Certainly not. But it’s a delightfully simple party game that really anyone can pick up and play. Does it help if you already have a nostalgic connection to these games? No doubt. But is this experience required? Absolutely not; In 2024, any of these 1980’s classics can be picked up and played by anyone quite easily as there are only two buttons to worry about.
While we’re on the subject of buttons, my only real complaint about Nintendo World Cup: NES Edition involves them. See, when four of you compete, all four of you have to press the A button to be ready before the event starts. The problem is that, so much of games use the B button as a turbo button or a start button, which you naturally want to hold as soon as the countdown timer reaches zero. But if one of the four of you hasn’t prepared yet and someone else starts pressing the B button waiting for the event to start, it returns everyone to the previous menu. This happened over and over during my 90-minute hands-on session, and I wasn’t the only one who happened to do this. Seems like a UI design flaw that needs to be addressed.
I have one other gripe, though this one is far less serious: the lag in Kirby’s Adventure (and maybe parts of other games I didn’t see enough to rule out). The versions of the 13 games included here are the original iterations, but during a few of Kirby’s challenges, lag kicked in and felt disruptive to the action – as it does with framerate in any game, modern or classic. I can see the argument for keeping each of the games as they are, but for the sake of the competition that is at the heart of the Nintendo World Cup gameplay, I’d prefer this ironed out. You may disagree and that’s OK!
In the mean time I haven’t played the online world championship mode as of course the game isn’t out yet and I have no one online to play with. But expect weekly leaderboards there, with the ability to watch replays of top players – a handy tool for improving your own skills and strategies.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition seems rightly priced at $30 for the digital version, and again I was surprised at how engaged I was with the seemingly simple challenges it offered (at least in the early rounds). I hope this is good because the name of this suggests we might get a SNES Edition, Nintendo 64 Edition and dare I say even a GameCube Edition if this is a hit.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor for visuals and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, The podcast is unlockedas well as our monthly interview show, IGN unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s a “Taylor ham,” not a “pork roll.” Discuss it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
