Game Theory: Nintendo World Championships is a lazy speedrunner's delight

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

Out of the various hobbies that exist adjacent to gaming—collecting games, writing fan fiction, getting apoplectically, lifespan-shorteningly angry at the existence of women or people of color in “your” hobby, etc.—few require as much sheer focus as speedrunning. (Although, some of the Twitter accounts of those GamerGate 2.0 wannabes do suggest they could give the ‘runners some very unpleasant competition as they race themselves to complete irrelevance.) Chasing after the fastest times in games is a pursuit for people willing to give themselves over completely to a game, learning every inch of it, fully comprehending its mechanics, and then devoting hours of practice so they can line up thumbs and neurons in exactly the correct sequence to shave a few tenths of a second off some record time. It’s a fascinating, grueling pursuit… but not one for the faint of heart, or attention span.

Happy news for dilettantes like us, then, who are interested in simply sampling the speedrun lifestyle without giving themselves over to it mind, body, and soul: Nintendo came up with a clever compromise recently. Last week, the publisher released Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, which is, on its surface, a pretty pure nostalgia exercise—but actually a “Speedrunning For Dummies” how-to in disguise. Named for the old-school Nintendo competitions that used to tour the malls and parking lots of the United States, challenging kids to post high scores in the hopes of being the next The Wizard, the title presents players with 12 classic Nintendo Entertainment System titles (and also Ice Climbers), each cut into tiny chunks, and tasks them with achieving the best times possible for each of these little video game snacks.

First off: If you noticed that this is basically the exact same premise as Nintendo’s old, stupidly fun NES Remix collections, congratulations: World Championships is basically the same concept, except without the very fun “remix” part. What it offers, instead, is an overwhelming focus on speed. The actual World Championships, back in the day, were focused more on score than time, but since nobody cares about points in 2024, the collection subs in the thrill of hunting down the lowest numbers possible. Chunks range from incredibly tiny—”Get the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros.”—to very robust—”Clear the entirety of Super Mario Bros. through savvy use of warp pipes”—while the branding is designed to hit aging Switch owners straight in the ol’ Nintendo Power subscription.

Where World Championships gets really clever, though, is in its use of online features. (One of those things Nintendo has gotten very good at, in an indirect sort of way, since at least when it rolled out Tetris 99.) The game has two: World Championship, which invites players to post scores on a series of the game’s individual challenges, and “Survival” mode, where you play against ghosts set by other players. The latter is a fairly neat way to simulate the game’s party game mode—which lets you play directly head-to-head with friends—but World Championship is the really brain-bending one, most especially because it allows players to submit as many “entries” as they like, and re-watch their past attempts with an eye toward improvement. Suddenly, you find yourself examining every frame of your run through Mario‘s 1-1, looking to find a moment where you could shave off a sliver of time or take a route that lets you keep the B-button hammered down a little more. (We also caught ourselves examining some of the ghosts in Survival mode to try to see how to get things running a little bit quicker on a handful of challenges, which was a fun element of cribbing off other players’ papers.)

At the end of the week, you get back your ranking (as well as one aimed directly at people of your player-inputted birth year; take that, other 40-year-old Nintendo nerds), which can then be safely stored in whichever portion of your self-esteem feels appropriate. Importantly, Nintendo also releases a video of the fastest completion of each challenge, allowing you to learn tricks from players who are better than you, the better to steal their life’s work from them in turn. The whole thing feels like a tourist’s version of speedrunning, which is, honestly, as much as our aging constitutions can probably handle. (The actual experience of playing 1-1 again and again, swearing loudly with each half-second fuck-up, and then slamming the reset button, felt a bit too close to home after a while.) As a way to experience gaming classics, the collection undeniably pales behind Nintendo’s own NES Online service; as a way to play them in bite-sized chunks, well, NES Ultimate Remix is a bit harder to get your hands on these days than it used to be, but still the superior title. But as a way to get a little taste of the addictive thrill of posting a time just a skosh better than your last one after an hour of dedicated repetition? It’s a pretty snazzy little package, all told.