Nintendo’s speedrunning collection made me see NES classics in a new way

There are few things I know better than Super Mario Bros. 3. Over the last few decades, I’ve replayed the game across basically every Nintendo platform, exploring its levels over and over, searching out each and every secret. But there’s one thing I never paid attention to: the timer. I’ve always taken a slow, methodical approach to the game, ignoring the tiny countdown clock. That changed with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, a collection of NES classics that have been chopped into pieces in the interest of pure speed. It showed me a new side to games I thought I knew intimately.

Named after Nintendo’s occasional in-person esports competition, the collection takes 13 of the company’s most iconic titles and divides them into more than 150 different challenges. Instead of playing through a game in its entirety, though, you’re experiencing brief moments, with the aim of completing them as quickly as possible. It’s speedrunning for beginners. And it turns familiar games into something faster and more compulsive.

It starts simple. The initial challenge I played in the solo mode involved getting the mushroom in the first level of the original Super Mario Bros. After that, I was swallowing an enemy as Kirby, running to the first ladder in Donkey Kong, and collecting the morph ball in Metroid. The earliest pieces are like a tutorial for the basics of how to play each game. Most only last a few seconds. You can even watch a short playthrough video before jumping in, so you know exactly what the goal is.

Completing a level gets you a score based on your speed as well as some in-game currency you can use to unlock more challenges. It’s a pretty steady progression: you start out doing the very basics, before moving on to completing whole levels or defeating bosses. Eventually, things get really hard. And the structure is pretty open, so you can tackle games in the given order or jump around as you see fit. I found myself initially sticking to old favorites like Metroid and Mario before braving the clunkier titles like Balloon Fight or Ice Climber.

But even when doing challenges for a game I’ve already played many times before, I’ve found myself playing them differently, which is sort of obvious since the goal here is entirely speed, but I was surprised by how quickly I became really competitive — even with myself. When playing solo, the screen is divided into two: on the left is your current playthrough, and on the right, a recording of your current fastest time. I’m typically not much of a perfectionist, but I’ve been playing challenges repeatedly just to shave a few tenths of a second off my time and get the coveted S rating. Part of this is because everything is so immediate; it only takes a second to restart a challenge and go again.

For games like Super Mario Bros. 3, this has forced me to abandon old habits. There’s no point wasting time collecting unnecessary power-ups or defeating enemies. Instead, I have to find the cleanest line through a level, which usually means avoiding almost everything and making sure I nail my jumps. Meanwhile, the repetition helped me appreciate other games I previously didn’t have much patience for.

I have always struggled with the twitchy sword fighting in The Adventure of Link, for example, so the challenges around combat were intimidating. But much like beating your head against a wall with an Elden Ring boss, I found myself slowly learning how and when to attack, and I actually got better at the game. The collection hasn’t changed my mind about everything, though. In fact, I might hate Balloon Fight even more after attempting some of the “master” challenges.

This structure makes for a great party experience. You can play with up to eight people locally, and things get chaotic, with the screen showing everyone’s gameplay simultaneously. This introduces the added difficulty of paying attention to only your playthrough amid everything else happening onscreen, not to mention the inevitable yelling happening IRL. There’s also an online component. In the one mode I was able to test, five challenges will be available each week, and you can replay them as many times as you want to claim a place on the leaderboards. I haven’t found this mode as fun as playing solo or with people in person, but it will be eye-opening seeing how good some players are.

As much as I have enjoyed playing the part of a speedrunner, the collection is probably best paired with an actual NES or a subscription to Switch Online and its retro games. It has given me a strong urge to replay many of these classics by instilling in me a new sense of confidence: now, I might finally be able to beat The Adventure of Link and its skeleton knights, or Super Mario Bros.’ devious sequel with its poison mushrooms. More than anything, though, I’m excited to have a new excuse to play through Super Mario Bros. 3 again — with one eye on the timer.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition launches on July 18th on the Nintendo Switch.