Nintendo deserves and often rightly gets a lot of credit for the proliferation of esports and speedrunning, two competitive video game subcultures that have exploded in recent years. The Nintendo World Championships events were among the first high-profile, publisher-led efforts at esports, and many of the best-known speedrunning records are based on classic NES games. It makes sense, then, that Nintendo would capitalize on its place in history with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, a hybrid speedrunning tutorial and ongoing online competition for Nintendo Switch. While the tools are a bit barebones for true speedrun enthusiasts, the presentation nicely preserves and illuminates the joy of racing to shave milliseconds off your best time.
Nintendo World Championships kicks off on a self-congratulatory tone, having you peruse icons, favorite NES games, and “Hype Tags”–slogans from throughout Nintendo history–to build your profile. The icons are all from Nintendo-published NES games, but the “favorite games” include lots of third-party games and even Famicom listings. Similarly, the slogans run the gamut from nostalgic (“Plays With Power”) to more contemporary (“Retro Game Collector”). It’s a nice little touch of personalization to welcome you into Nintendo’s long history.
Once you’ve created your profile, you can choose One Player or Party Mode. The One Player menu greets you with three gameplay options: Speedrun Mode, World Championships, and Survival Mode. Speedrun Mode makes for the bulk of single-player, and is composed of a large collection of challenges from across 13 classic Nintendo games. Those challenges are then reused for the solo online play and Party Mode challenges. The challenges include each NES Super Mario Bros. game (including the so-called Lost Levels), Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Excitebike, and Balloon Fight, among others.
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The challenges themselves are quick, lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a handful of minutes, but the presentation immediately stands out as smart, clean design that emphasizes improving your runs. The preview screen for a run shows you the goal in a clear, digestible way. Your current run is displayed on the left side of a split-screen, while your prior best run is shown simultaneously on the right. The split-screen even has a small controller-map display to show which buttons you’re pressing throughout your current and prior runs. For runs that require you to traverse through different screens, arrows will point you in the right direction. Pausing in a run is disallowed, but you can quick-restart with a tap of the shoulder buttons, or end one entirely with ZR and ZL. When you reach the final “Master” level challenge for each game, you get access to an old-school strategy-guide layout showing you what you need to do. It’s even called “Classified Information,” which is a sweet little hat-tip to the strategy section of the old Nintendo Power magazine.
Many of these assists can be turned off, but they combine to create an experience that is less about figuring out your goals, as you usually would in a classic Zelda or Metroid, and more about educating yourself so that you can start doing it as quickly as you can. It falls short of being a full-fledged interactive museum like Atari 50, but instead nicely fulfills its purpose of showing newcomers the ropes of speedrunning.
I say newcomers, though, because while the tools are nicely laid out and the presentation is very approachable, there isn’t much customization to be had for more serious speedrunning enthusiasts. For example, the speedruns are based purely on your completion time, and there is no toggle to disqualify a run based on factors like taking damage. That means that sometimes you can power your way through by getting hit without a time penalty, and it will still count as faster than performing the same run without taking a hit while more carefully avoiding obstacles. When there are extra criteria to meet–like not overheating in Excitebike, for example–you only learn about this condition by doing it, at which point the game will automatically rewind you with a penalty for the time spent. And while you get letter grades (C, B, B+, B++, A, A+, A++, and S), the interface is oddly unclear about what time-marks correspond to which letter grade. If you want to make sure you hit at least an A-rank, which rewards you with a special pin for your profile and extra coins, you won’t know what the target time was until you surpass it.
The speedrunning community has flourished in part due to its creativity in coming up with new challenges to push itself, and the lack of options here sacrifices that for simplicity. That makes it a good starting point for those curious about the community or looking for a new way to engage with their favorite retro games, but it’s not more ambitious than that.
Additionally, there is a freely available challenge for each game that, upon completion, earns you coins to unlock further challenges. Unlocking these challenges gets progressively more expensive as they grow more challenging, which unfortunately highlights another way Nintendo World Championship’s design feels somewhat at odds with itself. You only earn coins for completed challenges, so using the quick-restart if you notice a mistake gives you no currency to spend. But quick-restarting a speedrunning challenge is vital to how real speedrunners hone their craft, practice, and perfect their runs. It simply doesn’t feel good to restart a challenge five times for a good run and only get rewarded a small amount of coins for the last one. Even a bad grade in a completed challenge earns you something, so it’s often better to complete a bad run than to restart it, despite the wasted time this entails. And while unlocks come fast and easily at first, the final challenges are significantly more expensive, forcing you to grind.
To earn enough coins to unlock all the challenges, you realistically need to engage with the game’s asynchronous online modes, which will rotate in new challenges regularly. The World Championships Mode collects five challenges of various difficulties and lets you play them as many times as you want to set your best record. At the end of the competition period, you’ll see your ranking against all other players, and those who share your birth year–a welcome feature for younger kids who want to compete against each other, or older gamers like myself who know we don’t stand a chance against the reaction times of teenagers. Survival Mode gets closer to imitating a live competition, having you race against the ghost data of seven other players between three events in random order, eliminating players after each challenge. It isn’t live, but you get to see the other players’ runs concurrently with your own, so it feels thrilling in the same way.
Similarly, the couch co-op Party Mode pits you against up to seven other players in one location. Unlike the asynchronous online modes, these challenges are taken on simultaneously through a variety of pre-selected packs of stages, or you can select your own speedrun challenges for competition. It’s a quick, no-frills way to compete against your friends sitting side by side–though I would imagine you may need a rather large TV if you want to take advantage of the full eight-player limit.
The online modes feature a few flourishes not present in Speedrun mode, like simulated crowd noises matched to your performance–cheers when you finish, and “awws” when you fall short. They also grant you coins at a much faster rate, so keeping up with them will be a must to unlock all the challenges and profile images. And of course, it also seems like the most fertile ground for iteration, as Nintendo could introduce weeks built around a particular game or theme.
And that would be apt, because Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition feels more like a platform than a game in itself. It’s a set of tools to gently introduce players to speedrunning, and to encourage some light competitive hooks. Even the “NES Edition” part of the name suggests this is envisioned as an ongoing project with room for further exploration in the future. I hope it does, because this could serve as a great introduction to invite newcomers into the speedrunning community.