Nintendo World Championships 1990 (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of "Nintendo World Championships 1990," a cartridge made exclusively for use in the American competition of the same name.

Feeding off of the hype generated by The Wizard, the original Nintendo World Championships was a highly publicized tour of major cities across the US throughout 1990 in search of the best Nintendo player in the country. It was e-sports decades before the term was coined.

Among the prizes given out were the actual cartridges used in the competition. Since fewer than one hundred were ever made (including both the standard version and its gold variant), this is one of the "holy grails" for NES collectors, with prices for good condition copies of the more common grey cart version going for several thousands of dollars. If you've never seen one, the cartridges are pretty interesting to look at, too. They have a bank of four dipswitches (like you'd see on old arcade games) to manually set the game timer, which would be set to approximately six minutes, twenty seconds for the event.

The cartridge features three challenges, and their respective scores are each weighted when determining the final score:

0:05 Super Mario Bros., get 50 coins (base score)
1:32 Rad Racer, finish the course (score x10)
3:42 Tetris, high score within remaining time (score x25)

So clearly the weights should probably determine how you prioritize your time. Mario is worth the least, so it's in your best interests to get through it as quickly as possible to give yourself more time with Tetris at the end.

I did okay in this run, though my final score doesn't compare at all to the competition's highest winning score, which was Thor Aackerland's final mark of 4 million points. I can only suppose that the guy was a Tetris master. I mean, he became the face of Codemasters' NES ads because of his win, which was pretty cool.

NWC1990 is a really neat, fun way to challenge yourself if you get into chasing high scores. For the right person, there is a ton of quality game time in this little six minute package.

Here are my playthroughs of the individual games, if you'd like to check those out:

Super Mario Bros.:    • Super Mario Bros. (NES) Playthrough -...  

Rad Racer:    • Видео  

Tetris:    • Tetris (NES) Playthrough, Nintendo ve...  
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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