The newly released Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is all about mastery. The retro microgame collection takes 13 NES classics and breaks them down into bite-sized speedrunning challenges that beg players to replay them over and over to lower their best time. That process all leads to the package’s big event, the titular Nintendo World Championships. Every week, players all submit their best times for five specific challenges and fight for a top ranking come Monday morning.
I had no idea how I’d fare against hundreds of thousands of people in the game’s first week. While I’d been sharpening my skills during the review period for the game, I still didn’t have much confidence that I could make a splash in games like Super Mario Bros. that have been mapped out to perfection already.
It turns out I’m much better at Mario than I thought. And that’s a testament to what a powerful coach Nintendo World Championships is.
Taking on 1-1
For its maiden voyage, Nintendo World Championships started players off with some easy challenges. They’d have to get the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. as fast as possible, complete a vertical platforming sequence in Metroid, beat a short stretch of Super Mario Bros. 2, and quickly kill some bats in The Legend of Zelda. The hardest challenge, though, was more involved: beating World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. as fast as possible.
Players have a lot of time to up their game. A new tournament starts every Monday and ends the following one. In that time, players can keep trying to set new scores as many times as possible and can submit their best ones up until the tournament ends. There’s no real reward for doing so outside of getting a high spot on a weekly leaderboard, but there was a prize that the completionist in me needed: a profile badge only earned by placing in the top 20% of a tournament. The fight was on.
While I was able to snag S-ranks in Zelda and Metroid with ease, the Mario games posed a challenge. I love the series, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never been terribly skilled at the NES Mario titles. I’ve always had a hard time properly grasping how Mario slides around with momentum, leading to a lot of embarrassing deaths. To conquer the three challenges featured in the tournament, a feat that would require some pixel-perfect play, I’d need to up my skills.
A powerful learning tool
What’s so clever about Nintendo World Championships is that it acts as a teacher for people who have that mindset. In its single-player speedrun mode, players can complete a handful of challenges from each of its 13 games. Those aren’t random. If you look closely, you’ll realize that those are designed to teach players different skills needed to master games. In the Super Mario Bros. challenge suite, there’s one minigame that asks players to simply hop up a staircase as fast as possible. It seems like a small task, but it’s one that I realize will be critical to getting an S-rank on the tournament’s World 1-1 challenge.
After revisiting those lessons, I got to work. I began running World 1-1 over and over again. Each time I did, I took note of where I was losing time. I hammered out some obvious pain points early, as mistimed jumps over small staircases were shaving seconds off my time. Some of my biggest roadblocks were tiny. Early in the stage, Mario jumps over a few spaced-out green pipes of varying heights. While Mario can hop over one set of them, another is too high to reach from the pipe before it. Every time I went for that leap, I’d wind up bumping into the pipe’s edge and losing momentum. I spent a morning simply focusing on that over and over until I figured out the exact point I’d need to jump down to in order to leap up and clear the pipe without losing speed. It was probably a one-second time save at most, but it added up.
Soon, my best times got lower and lower. I was blowing through World 1-1 faster than I ever had and with hardly any error. After several attempts, I’d hit what felt like my limit when I finished the level at just 21.16 seconds. I had no idea how far off from perfection that was, but I was satisfied enough to submit it and hope it was enough to land in the top 20%.
When I logged in on Monday morning to view my results, my jaw dropped. My final ranking for the minigame was 363 out of 50,637. That would put me in the top .8% of players. For players born in 1989, I had reached ninth place out of 1,728. When I watched a replay of the first-place winner demolishing the level, I realized that I was closer to perfection than I thought: I was .05 seconds off from the first-place time.
While Nintendo World Championships is a lacking retro package, no game released this year has made me feel so accomplished. It gives players most of the tools they need to learn a game like a science, right down to illustrated instruction manuals that break down all the nuances and strategies for its hardest challenges. Watching a best time get lower and lower gives me a tangible sense of growth; I know when I’m actually getting better at a game. That’s a powerful learning tool that’s having visible effects for me already.
I can now say with confidence that I’m a master of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. That’s an accomplishment made possible by the unique premise of Nintendo World Championships, which continues to keep me logging in against all odds. I won’t stop now; it’s on to World 1-2 from here.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is available now on Nintendo Switch.
