Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is real, and it's a speedrunning-focused collection of retro challenges set to launch on July 18. The announcement trailer included less than a minute of footage, but it's spoken so deeply to my retro gaming heart that I'm already about to call this my 2024 game of the year.
The game features 150 challenges spread across 13 NES classics, all focused on completing an in-game objective as quickly as possible. There are challenges ranging from beating the first level of Super Mario Bros. to defeating a certain number of enemies in Zelda 2. You earn coins from completing these objectives that you can use to unlock further challenges, and you'll get letter rankings based on your performance after each goal.
Just like it seemed based on the ESRB leak, it looks like a slightly less wacky follow-up to NES Remix, which was one of my favorite Wii U releases. The difference here is the focus on time-based challenges, particularly a set of online leaderboard challenges that rotate weekly. There's also a party mode that'll let you run through the challenges with eight players at once locally.
The announcement trailer is largely about explaining the origins of the esports event that lends the game its name, but the 54 seconds or so of gameplay footage has been enough to sell me on the whole package. Boiling these games down to their most basic mechanics and giving you space to master them individually in bite-sized challenges sounds like a great way to revisit these classics in 2024, and I am very much here for it.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition hits July 18 for $30. You can also get a deluxe physical edition for $60. (Yes, I have already pre-ordered it.) In a press release, Nintendo confirmed the 13 games featured:
- Balloon Fight
- Donkey Kong
- Excitebike
- Ice Climber
- Kid Icarus
- Kirby's Adventure
- The Legend of Zelda
- Metroid
- Super Mario Bros.
- Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels
- Super Mario Bros. 2
- Super Mario Bros. 3
- Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link
I've already got my fingers crossed that after this NES Edition, we'll see a SNES Edition, Game Boy Edition, and more.
Several of the best NES games of all time are here.
