Nintendo World Championships Not A Real Winner For Fans In Chicago

By Jim Bochnowski in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 1, 2015 9:15PM

As we mentioned last week, Nintendo recently held a qualifying tournament for their Nintendo World Championships in Schaumburg. On a rainy Saturday, I drove up to the suburbs to see the action for myself.

Before I went up, I received a message from Logan Darby, a 22-year-old from outside Cleveland. He told me that he and five of his friends were so excited about the event, they were planning on taking the five hour drive from Cleveland to participate. With all the Internet hype over a once-in-25-years event, who could blame them?

The disclaimer on the event sheet said that registration for the event would start promptly at 9 a.m., with the competition beginning at 10 a.m. Only the first 750 people to show up would actually be allowed to compete. Darby told me that he and his friends arrived around 4:30 in the morning, where they saw about 20 or so people in line camping out to secure a place in line. Given the short line, Darby and his friends just decided to head back to the car to sleep instead of sitting out in the unseasonable freezing rain.

By the time registration opened up and Darby got in line, there were only 90 or so people actually in line. I headed up to Schaumburg with a friend of mine who said he would go on the condition that he didn't have to wake up so early.

The first thing I noticed was a lack of fanfare about the event. For something that Nintendo had been hyping for weeks, the Best Buy where the event took place operated like business as usual. By the time we got there, about ten people were standing outside waiting to be escorted into the building to try their hand at winning a spot in the national championship.

My friend registered for the event around noon and was given a wristband to indicate he was an official registered participant. The wristband also indicated that he was the 264th person to actually sign up at the Schaumburg location.

So after sitting out in the rain for about ten minutes, we were escorted into the store where two small tables were topped with several Nintendo 3DS systems. Each participant was told they had six minutes to complete three challenges: collecting a set number of coins in the first level of Super Mario Bros. 1 and 2, then playing Dr. Mario for as much time as they had remaining or until they lost. After their time was up, they were quickly shooed out and given a Nintendo poster, a leftover from some previous promotion at the store, as a keepsake.

The whole thing was very odd. Heralded by Nintendo as a once-in-a-generation promotion, in actuality the event seemed like an afterthought. Considering there were only eight qualifying sites across the country, couldn't the company have put out a little more effort into holding them in easily accessible locations? Or turning the promotion into an actual event, giving it a real festive, competitive atmosphere?

I had a chance to catch up with Darby after he drove back home. He said that even though he was disappointed in the competition and the fact that he wasn't able to see Chicago, he was still happy he went. "The only reason I'm glad I went was the experience of going on a road trip with friends, not the Nintendo experience I had," Darby said. Who doesn't love a good road trip? Even if we weren't all winners, at least someone had fun.

Check out Technology Tell's article for their take as well as photos of the lackluster affair.