In an industry rife with remakes, remasters, and re-releases, few companies have mastered the art of repacking leftovers for a nostalgia-driven appetite than Nintendo. With games like 1985’s NES classic Super Mario Bros. reissued dozens of times over four decades, even the youngest players are familiar with the look, feel, and basic gameplay of Nintendo’s classics.
With a legacy like that, Nintendo doesn’t really need to try hard to sell its back catalog, and with its latest collection, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, it most certainly isn’t. Instead, the Japanese developer is leaning into a more snackable take on retro gaming designed to appeal to speed-running obsessed masochists and those with decidedly short attention spans.
Nintendo World Championships doesn’t provide access to full NES games, but rather chops up its 8-bit titles into short sprints centered on specific goals to beat at a breakneck pace. It’s essentially a home recreation of the climactic moments of the 1989 film The Wizard, wherein a young gaming savant (Fred Savage) competes in a public tournament to dominate the then-unreleased Super Mario Bros. 3. Here, it’s your shot to play the lead and set a world record to the cheers of the crowd (literally, it’s a sound effect used in the game).
The package itself is essentially a mini-game compilation composed of snippets of games like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and Metroid boiled down into hyper specific missions to complete in a scored time attack. To say they’re short would be an understatement, as some trials are as simple as collecting the first super mushroom in Super Mario Bros.’ first stage, a feat that takes about five seconds. Others are as straightforward as entering a door in the original Legend of Zelda. There are goals that take literally about a second to beat.
Aside from tying the player’s hands to withhold the bulk of the actual gameplay from the classic games, the true intent of the collection is to train you in the art of speedrunning. Selecting a trial starts a tutorial demo that lays out the optimal way to complete the assigned task. Follow the instructions to a tee, and you’ll get a good rating. Fail and you’ll need to repeat. You’ll be doing that a lot.
The core single-player speedrunning mode amounts to constant restarting of a section of gameplay, racing against your own ghost in an adjacent screen that replays your best run. Spread across 13 titles that include the original Super Mario Bros. trilogy (and The Lost Levels), two Zeldas, Kid Icarus, and more, there are about 156 trials in all. The game ramps up the difficulty as it trains your brain to execute pixel-perfect runs in early sessions, while master or legendary-level missions amount to essentially completing a full level flawlessly. That’s it, that’s the game. But that doesn’t make it easy.
The most interesting aspect of Nintendo World Championships isn’t showcasing the elegance of Nintendo’s best, but rather reminding older players or educating new ones on just how archaic some of these games can be. Players reared on modern iterations of Nintendo IP are likely to be appalled by how some of the initial outings function mechanically. After ten failures in two minutes playing Kirby’s Adventure, you’ll scream, “This is how Kirby used to play?!”
Without the freedom to learn the individual quirks of each game at their pace, players are instead forced to learn in a repetitious trial by fire. For those willing to deal with the frustration, it can be rewarding, but many will be surprised by how much they think they know these games before the harsh reality hits. But when muscle memory kicks in during a particularly grueling section of Ice Climbers, there’s a novel satisfaction — before you’re ultimately forced to move onto something else.
Outside of beating your head against the wall to replace your best score by a few milliseconds, a more nuanced enjoyment can be found in multiplayer, where other people’s failures can be your saving grace.
At launch, there are two online multiplayer modes that ratchet up the competitive spirit beyond basic self-flagellation. “World Championships” is a series of five weekly trials to be bested for a global high score. If you’ve already cut your teeth on the single-player speedrun mode, it’s a good way to put your skills to the test to repeatedly clock in your best times to be logged against others worldwide. But it’s the second online mode that’s actually much more addictive.
“Survival Mode” pits eight players in a three-round knockout competition through the game’s various challenges. Thrown into the fray, you will need to share an eight-way split screen with other players all racing to accomplish the same goal, but the results are far more thrilling than going it solo. In the early pre-launch period, only a few hundred players were online, but the battles to survive were fierce when a single misstep can lead to a knockout.
Without the safety net of perpetual restarts, flawlessly navigating a particularly difficult trial while watching others fall flat in your periphery can be exhilarating. It’s especially satisfying to see the randomized trials present a game that you’re especially good at, putting an advantageous fire in your eyes for the final stand-off. Everyone knows the ins and outs of The Legend of Zelda, but watching your foes fall one by one down the mountain on Ice Climbers is a guilty pleasure.
Local multiplayer is also supported in the game’s “Party Mode,” which is playable with up to eight people. Like “Survival Mode,” it presents a series of challenges to complete head to head, although without the more severe knockout mechanics. Grouped into packs that have specific themes like “Short & Sweet” or “Technical Finesse,” the chunks of gameplay are broken up in ways that allow friends to choose the ones that best suit the mood, without necessarily anyone who’s uninitiated left hanging (unless that’s the cruel joke amongst your buds). Packs can also be quick sessions, most lasting from three to 10 minutes, and the most enduring running at 20 minutes.
It’s hard to say what the longevity is for a game like Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, especially without knowing what, if any, updates there will be to add to new content. It’s hard to even say who the game is for. Chopping retro games into seconds-long chunks could be an attempt to grab the attention of the TikTok generation, or it could be squarely centered on triggering nostalgia for an older crowd who have less time on their hands to revisit their childhood classics.
Being on the Switch, it does have the snackable appeal of micro-game collections like the WarioWare series — especially in handheld mode — but for anyone uninterested in endless time trials and self-inflicted frustration, there are many better ways to play these games in full. If you’ve already got a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, which is required to play Nintendo World Championships with others online, you’ve already got access to them all within the bespoke NES app. That’ll save you $30. But if your idea of a good time is hard-earned perfectionism as your inner monologue shouts, “Faster” in an imagined retro gaming take on Whiplash, then this is your weird fantasy fulfilled.
