Nintendo Announces Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition for Switch With Release Date and Debut Trailer

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Nintendo has announced Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition after the game was leaked via an ESRB rating.


The upcoming Switch game includes over 150 challenges from across 13 different NES games, with Speedrun Mode, global online leaderboards in World Championship Mode, and up to eight players in local Party Mode. These byte-sized challenges have an automatic rewind feature, letting you try again if you fail. Nintendo Switch Online members can enter World Championships Mode to submit their best times in five challenges that rotate each week and compete for a spot on the global leaderboard.

Nintendo released a debut trailer, below, that leans into the famous 1990 U.S. tournament upon which this new game is based. That Nintendo tournament used a custom NES cartridge that includes minigames based on Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris. The Nintendo World Championships 1990 Game Pak is now considered the most valuable NES cartridge ever released.


Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition launches on Nintendo eShop priced $29.99 on July 18, 2024. A $59.99 Deluxe Set is also available. This Deluxe Set, pictured below, includes a gold-colored replica cartridge and stand to commemorate the 1990 World Championships, as well as 13 art cards — one for each NES title represented in the game — and pins modeled after four in-game badges and the game logo. It also includes a physical version of the game. Pre-orders for the digital version of the game are available now on Nintendo eShop.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition contains speedrun challenges taken from these NES titles:​

• Balloon Fight
• Donkey Kong
• Excitebike
• Ice Climber
• Kid Icarus
• Kirby’s Adventure
• Metroid
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Mario Bros. 2
• Super Mario Bros. 3
• Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels
• The Legend of Zelda
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

The announcement of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition helps flesh out the Switch's lineup of exclusive games for the rest of 2024. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is planned for release on May 23, and Luigi's Mansion 2 HD on June 27. Looking further ahead, and with the recently announced June Direct in mind, Nintendo has Pokémon Legends: Z-A for 2025, as well as Professor Layton and the New World of Steam also due out that year. The long-awaited Metroid Prime 4 is still down as a Switch game in Nintendo’s financial reports, although it has a ‘TBA’ release window.

This week, Nintendo announced a bullish sales target for the Switch for the current financial year, which ends March 2025, even as it announced plans to reveal the Switch successor console, reportedly due out spring 2025.


Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].