Nintendo World Championship - Games

Games

Contestants played a specialized game cartridge designed specifically for the contest. Officially, a player has 6 minutes and 21 seconds to play, which is divided up into three minigames. The first minigame of the competition is to collect 50 coins in Super Mario Bros.. The next minigame is a version of Rad Racer where players must complete a specialized Nintendo World Championship course. The final minigame is Tetris, and this lasts until time expires. Once time expires, a player's score is totaled using the following formula:

(Super Mario Bros. score) + (Rad Racer score x 10) + (Tetris score x 25) = final score

There were two methods to obtaining fifty coins in Super Mario Bros. The first method involved going down the first pipe, collecting 20 coins, finishing the board, and getting the remainder of the coins in World 1-2. The second method had the player dying twice on World 1-1. Strangely, the second method proved much faster. Thor Aackerlund used this method during the tour to get the World Record score of over 4,000,000 points.

The highest score with the first method during the city tour was 2,800,000 by Jeff Falco.

The first two games were modified so that a player could not get a "game over." In Super Mario Bros., the player was given 99 lives, and in Rad Racer, the in-game timer was permanently fixed at 99 seconds. In Tetris, however, stacking a line of blocks over the top of the playing field would effectively end the game prematurely, as the player could not start again; the game would freeze at the "game over" screen until the 6:21 competition time ran out.