E3: The Nintendo World Championship

Originally published in 1990, The Nintendo World Championship was a NES game that Nintendo promoted across the United States. It started out as a combination of Super Mario Bros, Tetris and Rad Racer games –where competitors had six minutes to chase the highest score possible, rank on the leaderboard, and ultimately become the ultimate Nintendo champion. Now, 25 years later Nintendo hosts the second Nintendo World Championship with sixteen new competitors to battle it out. Organized in four groups of four, they compete on best of three – once they win, they advance onto the next stage. If they lose, then they have to face the other losing team and risk the chance to be removed from the tournament.

The Championship starts out with Splatoon, followed by The Legend of Zelda. The second stage presents a Nintendo world premiere, an entirely new 3DS game that resemblance Metroid Prime Hunters – action-oriented first person multiplayer mech shooter. Not much was said about BlastBall at the time, but hopefully Nintendo will have more information on this title soon enough. The elimination round for the next stage was Super Metroid.

Mario Kart 8 was the first part of the third stage. Divided by groups, competitors battled it out before moving on to the next group into Super Smash Bros, followed through Balloon Fight as the elimination round for this stage.  The fourth Stage was Super Smash Bros for Wii U, and at this point we have got four remaining contestants out of only two moving forward with the highest scores: Cosmo White and John Numbers.

Final stage was Super Mario Maker, with levels by Nintendo Tree House members, White and Numbers get to play three levels alternatively; initially this stage started with Super Mario Bros, then Super Mario Bros 3, following Super Mario World and finally Super Mario Bros. U customized levels. The idea was to finish the level or simply do more in less time, only to grant them a head start at the last level. This was perhaps the most exciting part throughout the whole 4 hours event, considering these custom Mario levels were downright insane to play.

Shigeru Miyamoto charmed the audience away at the end when he appeared to congratulate John  Numbers as the winner of The Nintendo Championship 2015, presenting Numbers with an autographed new 3DS and Nintendo trophy. Nintendo kicked off E3 2015 with their fantastic Nintendo World Championship event, getting gamers primed for the Nintendo Digital Event on June 16, followed by Nintendo Tree House: Live on June 16 to 18.