The first thing you’ll notice upon wandering into the main hall of the Classic Gaming Expo? A series of TVs, set up with reproductions of both the 1990 Nintendo World Championships NES cart, as well as the lesser-known 1991 Nintendo Campus Challenge — boy, college life seemed a whole lot tamer 20 years ago, didn’t it? If you don’t know about the former, the 1989 movie The Wizard — which we’ll be talking about on this week’s Retronauts — planted the idea in the brains of receptive children shortly before Nintendo rolled out their event nationwide (strangely enough, these “world” championships didn’t stray outside of the continental United States). The Classic Gaming Expo features their own take on this fabled event, though it involves two different competitive carts, and the stakes are much lower — no trip to Universal Studios (gasp!) for the winner of this one. Sorry, but you’ll have to visit the smoldering ruins of the Back to the Future ride on your own dime.
When Nintendo originally rolled out their nationwide tour, the world was a much smaller place — for me, anyway. Being eight years old, anything greater than a trip to my friend’s house a few blocks away seemed to be the stuff of dreams, so, needless to say, I didn’t make it to the closest destination, which would have been Cleveland. So, in a sense, getting to sit down and play these carts for the sake of an actual competition finally gave me some petty sense of closure, even if I could have downloaded the ROMs for myself ages ago. The strange thing is, for 1990, the selection of games available feels just a bit dated, though I imagine the powers that be chose older games because they assumed a wider audience would be more familiar with them; five years after the release of Super Mario Bros. and most kids had a better knowledge of its 32 levels than they did of American History or their extended family (I know I did).
