Remember The Wizard, where Fred Savage escorts his endearingly quirky (autistic?) brother to a video game tournament while also finding love? Remember how seriously kick-ass that tournament was? He played Mario 3! That shit was rad. How about the real life event?
Nintendo World Championships
The greatest video in ESPORTS history
Wiki claims the event was based on the end sequence in the movie. I've never run across anything confirming, but it came out in late 1989 and the competitions were held in spring of 1990 so its probably not necessary. The entire thing was set as a weekend long convention to showcase Nintendo products that drew kids in with a multi-game tournament. Basically a miniature, traveling E3.
To compete, there was a special cartridge made that is now worth quite a bit. It had Super Mario Brothers, Rad Racer, and Tetris with the goal being to get the highest score, the Wiki page details nicely how it all worked.
Contestants played a specialized game cartridge designed specifically for the contest. Officially, a player has 6 minutes and 21 seconds to play, which is divided up into three minigames. The first minigame of the competition is to collect 50 coins in Super Mario Brothers. The next minigame is a version of Rad Racer where players must complete a specialized Nintendo World Championship course. The final minigame is Tetris, and this lasts until time expires. Once time does expire, a player's score is totaled using the following formula:
(Super Mario Bros.) + (Rad Racer x 10) + (Tetris x 25) = final score
Some players focused their tactic on getting a high score in Tetris while others tried to exploit a trick in Super Mario Brothers where a part of the game may be played repeatedly using warp pipes. There were two methods to obtaining fifty coins in Super Mario Bros. The first method involved going down the first pipe, collecting 20 coins, finishing the board, and getting the remainder of the coins in World 1-2. The second method had the player dying twice on World 1-1.
Strangely, the second method proved much faster and Thor Aackerlund used it during the tour to get the World Record score of over 4,000,000 points.
The last part is my favorite and best fitting for TL. Someone figured out the fastest way to finish the first game way to die twice, abusing the fact that you can't lose there. Serious ESPORTS.
The format involved playing in two pools, and advancing if you scored above certain thresholds (175k and 200k). "Winning" those qualified you to play on sunday, where you would do the same over and they selected the top 7 to play on stage, with the top 2 scorers winning a trip to the world finals. I have no idea why it was called the "World Championships" when it was obviously United States centered, although something similar was held in Tokyo at one point.
Its not clear to me how the finals worked, some pictures exist of the event exist that suggest it was the same as before, though I've read things talking about Super Mario Brothers 3 being part of what was played in Universal Studios.
Also the dude who won the middle age category is named Thor, which is badass. He went on to represent Camerica, a company only known for releasing bad and unlicensed NES games.
Nintendo hosted 2 more similar events, Campus Challenge and PowerFest '94, which were more of the same with different games and a slightly modified tournament structure. These must have been much less popular, as they recieved considerably less press and are more difficult to find any information on.
I have a few friends who attended these, and they have extremely positive memories. Going to a video game tournament at 10 years old is probably the greatest moment of your life, though I can't imagine making events that annoy parents is a great business model.
Good blog. The Wizard was a terrible movie but if I had seen it when it was released I know I would have shit myself with joy during the end competition scenes.
I don't get why they sent the kid who won the 11 and under to represent America against the Japanese person. Was it a kids only tounry? And what came of THAT competition? I couldn't find anything about it after googling for about 20 seconds.
lol geez that announcer would have made me really pissed off if he was screaming at me from 2 feet away when i was trying to micro mah tetris blocks O_O
On March 03 2011 03:51 AirbladeOrange wrote: Good blog. The Wizard was a terrible movie but if I had seen it when it was released I know I would have shit myself with joy during the end competition scenes.
I don't get why they sent the kid who won the 11 and under to represent America against the Japanese person. Was it a kids only tounry? And what came of THAT competition? I couldn't find anything about it after googling for about 20 seconds.
I have no idea either, I couldn't find anything all morning about the japan competition but I might try again when I home tonight. Its especially weird because Thor is considerably more famous and stuff about him is everywhere.
Yeah I remember participating in preliminaries for a blockbuster video game tournament in the early 90s. Basically, it was over the course of like 4 weeks and I can't remember exactly but either you needed to be top x % to move on to the next week or it was cumalitive score after the games to determine who went on to the live tournament.
I just remember that the games included Clayfighters and NBA Jam (on Super NES).
I remember my older brother competing in the blockbuster one (or one of them) for the genesis, and making it to the state finals. The games were sonic 3, nba jam, and virtua racer.
My parents did not allow me to compete for some unknown reason, despite the fact I was significantly superior to him.
Any way, nba jam is dumb, if I wanted to watch a ball bounce around all day long I would be out in the street not playing video games kthx.
Oh man, I had no idea about this. This was almost as cool as Swordquest.
The contest prize was a "Philosopher's Stone," which in this case was a large chunk of white jade in a 18K gold box encrusted with diamonds, emeralds, citrines, and rubies, valued at $25,000. The four winners of all four game contests were also supposed to compete for the "Sword of Ultimate Sorcery", a sword with a gold handle encrusted with jewels, and a gleaming pure silver blade which was valued at $50,000.
Awesome blog and amazing read. Nice being able to read and get some insight into what game tournaments ages ago were like, not to mention the awesome commentary (why don't we have a tetris man in the SC community? ).
p.s. for anyone who was wondering about the prizes (as I was), from wikipedia: "The top winner in each age category took home a $10,000 U.S. savings bond, a new 1990 Geo Metro Convertible, a 40" rear-projection TV, and a gold painted Mario trophy. Runners up in each age category received a silver Mario trophy. The remainder of the top seven of each age category received a thousand dollar savings bond."
Man I am going back to watch The Wizard again. When I saw it, I shit my pants so hard and how badass that kid was. The final competition was fucking ballet!
when i was younger i competed in one at blockbuster where i played donkey kong country, clayfighter, some racing game and something else...i dont remember much besides i won free rentals from blockbuster for a year
Wow! I never knew about this at all! One of the earliest events on e-sports. 1990? I was expecting it around 1995... What a nice find along with that WCG 2005 footage thread... Epic day indeed....
On March 03 2011 20:41 omg.deus wrote: when i was younger i competed in one at blockbuster where i played donkey kong country, clayfighter, some racing game and something else...i dont remember much besides i won free rentals from blockbuster for a year
haha I found a GamePro ad of the games from the first year. Looks like Virtua Racing (side note - the 32x version of this game was actually kind of good). I think Donkey Kong Country Competition Edition thing was the second one.
On March 03 2011 06:47 Bosu wrote: Looks like Thor started up a blog last month about retro gaming. Neat.
Thanks for the heads up, this is great it has him and some other NWC guys. This is a hilarious photo I found of him while searching for it. Apparently there is a Tetris doc coming out about the game's competitive side that has him in it. I'm pretty psyched for that, there are at least 3 good looking video game competition docs supposedly coming out this year. edit: I watched the trailer and it looks awesome, link. Looks like it covers a lot of NWC stuff which is great because this wiki article leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
The more stuff I read on Thor the crazier it gets.
"I never really thought about it. It was very surreal at the time, but the contest followed a period in my life that was really hard, our house in The Colony, TX burned down the year before, and my mother had an attack of ventricular tachycardia that left her very lucky to be alive and a very long hospital stay and rehabilitation period," Aackerlund recalled. "In the end it was a small bright spot in the midst of a lot of hardship and transition."
heres an interview with Rob Mihara, third place in his age category at NWC and a part of that Tetris doc. Its pretty good, it says "his next challenge is mastering the power glove".
On March 04 2011 04:30 JayDee_ wrote: That announcer has a hilarious 80's mullet
Hey now, that's not a mullet. Mullets are short in the front.
I take offense to this because I had one of those cool hair styles back in those days just like the announcer. People see pictures of me from back then and think it looks dumb and nobody believes me it was once a sweet ass hairstyle. Maybe some day it will come back and get the revenge it deserves...
Ah I remember the Donkey Kong Country tournament. I had the highest score in my local blockbuster. My name was still on the top of the scoreboard, but someone allegedly beat my score but they never updated the board, so my child's brain was very disappointed in not being able to go to the next stage, despite looking like I was in first. I rented the game and trained hardcore at home too. haha. They gave out marvel trading cards each time you entered. You were allowed 3 entries. I gave 2 of my 3 packs of cards away to friends who were too lazy to enter but bugged me for em. I kind of regret doing that. Overall it was pretty awesome though
On March 04 2011 11:50 Bijan wrote: I love how when they're saying "These contestants are the best in their professions - " they're cutting to shots of children under 12.
Thats the best part, they cut to shots of little kids and then the camera switches to a bunch of weird looking middle aged dudes.
The whole Swordquest fiasco is pretty interesting, I was under the impression that Twin Galaxies' funded National Video Game Team was the first instance of large scale competition but it looks like Earthworld was released about 6 months earlier. Maybe I'll do a writeup on it if I can find any information that ScrewAttack vid doesn't have.
I'm trying to get an interview with Thor now, I emailed his brother his morning but he hasn't responded. I think I might have scared him off, it was kind of long. Rob Mihara claims he was practicing Tetris for 8 hours a day before the competition so now I'm super curious as to how they all prepared. I got the contact info of a guy running a panel they're both speaking at in a month and he seems happy to help me ask questions, so I might have a backup plan.
On March 04 2011 08:14 Shady wrote: great! gotta love nintendo for doing such events in times where nobody heard of something like eSports
I haven't found proof yet, but I stumbled across some rumors that there was TV coverage planned that fell through. Some VHS footage exists thats apparently a pre-show for an entire special on it that was never aired, it would be unreal to find that but I think the people who own it are pretty protective.
The movie is currently on german TV. Its gives me a lot of nostalgia goosebumps.. double dragon, hero turtles .. wow. Sad that we never had such arcades (atleast where kids could play).
EPT
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