WTF? ITE?: The golden Nintendo World Championships game
Posted by drocolate on July 7th, 2009
A dude named JJ Hendricks spent $17,500 on a video game last week. It wasn’t an amazing, super-advanced new game (like that sick shit they had in Lawnmower Man… I’d pay like a milly for that amazingness) or a black market copy of a leaked Project Natal game.
Oh no, it wasn’t anything like that.
So what is it? What did Mr. Hendricks spend $17,500 (that’s a car!) on?
It’s rare.
It is a rare gold copy of the 1990 NES release, Nintendo World Championships. The game itself is only six and a half minutes long and it was used as part of a Nintendo-sponsored gaming contest in 1990. Nintendo made over 100 copies of the game but only 26 were gold, and of those 26 only 12 have ever surfaced.
So yeah, it’s rare, but $17,500 (that’s a freaking car!!) is still insane.
It’s short.
The game consists of three small portions of three existing NES titles — Super Mario Brothers, Rad Racer (Yeah! Rad!) and Tetris. When this Nintendo World Championship thing went down the competitors would have the six and a half minutes to beat a section of Mario, get through a race in Rad Racer and get as many points as they could on Tetris. At the end of the 390 seconds the scores were added up and the winner was announced.
Check out more details on the in-game action HERE. Or don’t.
So the entire gaming experience wound up costing Mr. Hendricks about $45 per second. Fuck.
It’s gold AND it’s related to the movie The Wizard.
I like gold things, and I think The Wizard is one of the best movies about playing NES ever made, but $17,500??!?! THAT IS A FUCKING CAR!! AHHHHH!!!
WTF?!? ITE?!?
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And now as a bonus, here is a video that summarizes the entire in-person 1990 Nintendo World Championships. It’s pretty awful, but the soundtrack gets an A+. I’ll go ahead and spoil the end for you: A dude named Thor wins it all.
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Previously on WTF? ITE?:
Tags: gold, nintendo, waste of money, WTF? ITE?, youtube
Does anyone else remember the Nintendo stores at malls? They had, like, seven or eight consoles hooked up to the latest and greatest (CASTLEVANIA! SOLAR JETMAN! MARIO 2!). My mom would only give me a five minute allowance. I wasted this on Paperboy several times without accomplishing anything.
Oh, when it was so simple. When nerds were just nerds. And when mullets were just mullets.