Nintendo World Championships Return for 2017

The third Nintendo World Championship (held originally in 1990 and again in 2015) will be held October 7 in the Manhattan Center’s Grand Ballroom, New York, USA.  Qualifying tournaments at select Best Buy stores across the country (New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Dallas, Seattle, and Miami) will begin later this month (August 19). At the tournaments, attendees can also play demos for Mario Odyssey and Metroid: Samus Returns. Details and store addresses can be found on the official website.

This year, Nintendo has added a 12 and under division that hasn’t previously been present. The other age division is simply 13+. At the qualifying tournament, the website says that competitors will be playing Mario Kart 7 for the 3DS to compete for their spots in the competition.Whether or not there will be prizes of any kind has not yet been specified.

The Nintendo World Championship is perhaps most well-known from its legacy of the legendary golden Nintendo World Championship cartridges, which are often called not just the rarest NES game, but arguably the rarest video game of all time. For collectors, a golden 1990 Nintendo World Championship cartridge is a holy grail that commands 10s of thousands of dollars when they go on the market (which, as you can imagine, is almost never).