Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is all about millennials killing milliseconds

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a finely crafted nostalgia trip, in the vein of the decade-old NES Remix games, that taps into the competitive spirit of the esports event Nintendo launched more than 30 years ago. Despite being another collection of well-worn NES titles repackaged as a minigame speedrunning challenge, I can’t put Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition down. My thumbs (and my work deadlines) are suffering because of it.

Nintendo’s new collection spans 13 classic NES games, which are presented as a series of escalating challenges. The collection’s Speedrun Mode is the main draw, featuring 150 trials spread across titles like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, in which players are asked to perform a short and sweet task — like collecting the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros., or completing a level in Ice Climber — as fast as possible.

This may not sound incredibly compelling on paper, but in practice, shaving tenths of a second off your best time is strangely intoxicating. As I was writing this sentence, I just replayed a particular level in a Super Mario Bros. challenge 12 more times, ultimately dropping 0.13 seconds off my score. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition makes me feel like an honest-to-goodness speedrunner, without the years of practice.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is built for speed, both in how short some of the tasks are — one Super Mario Bros. 2 challenge takes just 1.1 seconds to complete with an S-rating — but in how quickly these challenges load and reload. Whiff a jump, and you need only press two buttons to instantly restart a level. Only a handful of challenges last longer than a minute, and generally include trials that span full or multiple levels of a game.

The World Championships mode attempts to revive the spirit of the original Nintendo World Championships competition on a global, internet-connected scale. Each week, players are faced with five rotating challenges, ranging from normal to hard to master difficulties. This week’s challenges are from Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Super Mario Bros. 2, and players have unlimited attempts to improve their times before the contest’s deadline. So far, I’ve only been competing with people who also have a pre-release copy of the game; no doubt our scores will pale in comparison to actual professional speedrunners when they get their hands on Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition.

Smartly though, Nintendo has considered its audience: the aging millennials and Gen Xers who grew up on the NES. In addition to world rankings for World Championships, Nintendo will also publish rankings by birth year, meaning players will be able to compare their times and skills against similarly aged players who also have diminishing reflexes and scant free time.

Image: Nintendo

Players can also compete against other players using their “ghost data” — recordings of other players’ runs at various challenges — in Survival Mode. This mode uses a similar set of challenges from World Championships mode, and feels like an opportunity to win some in-game trophies and coins to spend on cosmetic items, but there’s little to it otherwise.

Additionally, there’s a Party Mode, in which up to eight players can compete locally on a single screen in themed challenges that vary in difficulty. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to play this mode at its full potential, but competing against my wife in speedrun-focused challenges has confirmed that she’d rather play Mario Kart 8 (or, more honestly, The Sims 4 while I help her pick out stain treatments for furniture).

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is full of nice, nostalgic touches that reinforce its retro authenticity. It uses the Nintendo Power typeface treatment throughout menus, and even resurrects that magazine’s “Classified Information” tips and tricks section for in-game guides that show how to complete the collection’s toughest challenges. And in the World Championships mode, the game overlays the sound of a cheering crowd on top of in-game audio, giving you the feeling of competing at one of the Nintendo World Championships events Nintendo has held over the decades.

Image: Nintendo

The biggest complaint I have about Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is its meager selection of games. The catalog spans just 13 NES games, all of them published by Nintendo, and is missing some obvious 8-bit classics, like Punch-Out!!, Dr. Mario, Donkey Kong Jr., and others that were part of the NES Remix series and the NES Classic Edition. This small selection of games stands out, as Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition players are prompted to pick their favorite NES (or Famicom) game, a catalog that spans hundreds of titles. Hopefully, Nintendo will inject more NES classics and speedrunning challenges to keep the collection feeling fresh over the following months.

What is on offer in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a delight. I don’t think it will make me any better at playing Nintendo’s old 8-bit games, but the challenges it presents are cleverly and cleanly designed. The collection lets me approach a small bunch of familiar NES classics from a new perspective, reinforcing just how timeless some of Nintendo’s earliest games are.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition will be released on July 18 on Nintendo Switch. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a pre-release review code provided by Nintendo. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.