Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition – First Impressions of the Remixed Classics

The 1989 movie The Wizard had a profound effect on me as a kid. In it, young Fred Savage’s character makes his way to the Nintendo World Championships in, heck, I don’t even remember what city, but it was somewhere far away, in order to put his video game skills to the test. Anyway, once he gets there, a big twist in the event is that he competes in the then-unreleased Super Mario Bros. 3. And boy oh boy did that product placement work to perfection – I had to have Super Mario Bros. 3 the moment it came out after that, and God bless my mom, she bought it for me. Her taking it out of that white plastic K-Mart grocery bag and just handing it to me – it wasn’t even my birthday or anything! – is a core memory for me.

That is what I think of when I think about the Nintendo World Championships, but for others, the real-life competition was far more about just that: a real-life competition. Now, Nintendo is putting a creative twist on the nostalgia for its own history in a way that only they seem to be really good at: by turning into a local and online multiplayer game for the Nintendo Switch that’s played in increments ranging from under two seconds (this is not a joke) to about a minute at most.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition includes 13 games: Super Mario Bros. 1-3, Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels, Zelda 1 and 2, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Donkey Kong, Ballon Fight, Excitebike, Ice Climber, and Kirby’s Adventure. I ended up dabbling in each of them during a 90-minute hands-on session across both solo modes and the local Party Mode. I certainly knew what I was walking into – a collection of classic NES games from my childhood turned into competitive challenges – but I didn’t expect the format to be so much fun.

Of these games, Kirby’s Adventure was the only one I’d flat-out never played as a kid, and sure enough it was the Kirby challenges that tripped me up the most. But outside of that, I had an absolute blast trying to earn S rankings on the myriad challenges on offer for each game. They get progressively more difficult as you go, naturally, and you have to unlock the tougher ones with coins you earn by getting good rankings on the challenges you do have access to.

As an example, the first challenge from The Legend of Zelda is so simple it probably sounds stupid: you start from the beginning of the game and have to walk into the cave that’s on the very first screen and acquire the sword. And yet, I found myself replaying it multiple times to try and shave tenths of a second off of my time and get that pride-inflating S ranking.

Party Mode is where it really got fun, though. IGN’s Rebekah Valentine and I competed in a series of challenges in Party Mode against Nintendo reps. We sped through World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. 3. We got the first energy ball in Metroid. We climbed to the top of the first stage in Donkey Kong, we took a lap around the track in Excitebike, and more. Is it the perfect re-creation of an in-person competition with hundreds if not thousands of people cheering you on? Certainly not. But it is a delightfully simple party game that truly anyone can pick up and play. Will it help if you already have a nostalgic connection to these games? No doubt. But is that experience required? Absolutely not; in 2024, any of these 1980’s classics can be picked up and played by anyone pretty easily, as there are only two buttons to worry about.

Although speaking of buttons, my one genuine complaint about Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition involves them. See, when four of you are competing, all four of you have to press the A button to ready up before an event starts. The problem is, so many of the games use the B button as a turbo or run button that you naturally want to be holding it as soon as the countdown timer hits zero. But if any one of the four of you hasn’t readied up yet and anyone else starts laying on the B button in anticipation of the start of the event, it backs everyone out to the previous menu. This happened over and over during my 90-minute hands-on session, and I wasn’t the only one accidentally doing this. It seems like a UI design flaw that there must be a solution for.

I have one other nitpick, though this one is far less serious: the slowdown in Kirby’s Adventure (and perhaps in parts of other games that I didn’t see enough of to rule out). The versions of the 13 games included here are the original iterations, but during a couple of the Kirby challenges, the slowdown kicked in and felt disruptive to the action – as framerate hitches do in any game, modern or classic. I can see the argument for preserving each of the games as-is, but for the sake of the competition that’s at the heart of the gameplay in Nintendo World Championships, I’d prefer that it have been smoothed out. You may disagree, and that’s OK!

Meanwhile, I didn’t play the Online World Championships mode since, of course, the game isn’t out yet and there’s no one online to play with. But expect weekly rankings there, with the ability to watch the replays of the top players – a handy tool for improving your own skills and strategies.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition feels priced right to be at $30 for the digital version, and again I was surprised at how engaged I was with the seemingly simple challenges it puts forth (at least in the early rounds). I hope this does well, because the name of this implies that we might get a SNES Edition, Nintendo 64 Edition, and dare I say even a GameCube Edition if this one is a hit.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.