Nintendo World Championships

Note: some of the information in this page may be fairly inaccurate, and this page needs a serious overhaul. Please contact me if you have more information

The year 1990 was a very significant year for Nintendo. The NES was at its peak of popularity, almost every kid had a NES, or at least had a friend who did, and many also had one of Nintendo's newest creations, the Game Boy, and the world was on the verge of the release of the eagerly awaited Super Mario Bros 3. Nintendo decided that year to hold a national contest, to eventually crown the "World Nintendo Champion".

Here is how the tournament went: various competitions were held in the major US cities, which were open to all. Each competition consisted of three age groups. After several days of open competition, a few were chosen to go on to the Nintendo World Chapionship finals, which were held at Universal Studios. Two were eventually chosen to compete against each other, two in each of the three age groups.

There were a couple of interesting things that came out of this event. The biggest, for NES cart collectors, is the ultra-rare NWC cart, which contains the competition version of Rad Racer, Tetris and Super Mario Bros. Both a gold version as shown above, as well as a grey cartridge with white label exist, the gold carts being even rarer. Nintendo said they gave away 50 (or was it 100?) NWC carts in a Nintendo Power Players Poll contest; how many carts actually existed (including those that were used in the competition and probably later locked away in the bowels of Nintendo of America's HQ never to see the light of day again) is exactly known. Approximately 116 grey carts were made, an unknown number of old carts were made, but only a handful probably exist.

One other oddity that definately is worth mentioning is the film that was released to hype the championships, "The Wizard", starring that ever versitile actor Fred Savage, and some kid whom I forget. I can't remember much, but as I recall, Fred was the brother of a Nintendo prodigy, and they have some kind of fallout with their parents, and they end up taking a silly journey across the country to Universal Studios for the NWC. At the NWC, Super Mario Bros. 3 was debuted; basically the idea of the movie was to plug the NWC and SMB 3. If there is any info on this movie on the 'net (other than professional critic reviews) please let me know.

If you were involved in the NWC, I'd love to hear from you, firsthand, what happened at the competitions and such. If you own one of those gold carts, I'd especially like to hear from you. And, if you were the NWC champion (and can prove it), I'd *really* love to hear from you.

The 1994 championships were not quite as big as the 1990 championships, but certainly worth noting. The games used in this years' tourney were SNES games, and like their 1990 NES counterparts, featured competition using a special collection of three games; Super Mario All-Stars, Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball and Mario Kart. Unlike the NES championship carts, only PCBs were made, not complete cartridges. Also, they were not given away as prizes after the championships. But these PCBs may still exist, and may show up on eBay and/or being released as a ROM dump.

Thanks to Mike L for some of the firsthand information on this page