Story time?

I, too, participated. I was only 10 years old and didn’t fully understand points so I was out in the first round, but I got a Super Mario peechee and some stickers.

That's pretty much the whole story.

It was set up so you had to pay something like $5 every attempt. If you got something like over 150k points you could take a shot at the next quarter final round. Score over 200k on a quarter final and you got a slot in the end of day semi final round.

The whole thing was really all about who was best at Tetris and nothing more. The rest was just how fast you could blitz through Super Mario & Rad Racer to get to Tetris the fastest. Looking back, the best strategy was to actually let yourself die in Mario so you could redo the first pipe coin room.

Which was very disappointing to kid me. It was 1990. Kids had stopped giving a shit about the first Mario for two years, and nobody gave a shit about Rad Racer in the first place. Tetris was a fine puzzle game and all, but when a kid heard "Nintendo world championship", they imagined a contest of blasting aliens and ninjas, not puzzling out some commie block stacking game. To kids, Tetris was that game your dad was into.

My story ends with that though. I only qualified for the quarter final once, with a score of something like 220k when I managed to score 2 tetrises. My previous attempts were something like 110k. I was so fucking proud of that 220k in what felt like a perfect game.

And little me would be crushed by the realization that the top players were edging close to 2 million points.

Another crushing realization from that day: the movie The Wizard had come out only 4 months before. The finale of that movie was the image I had in my head on how the actual championship would play out. Huge event with cinematic climaxes like a wrestling event, and giant stage with screaming audiences as I did battle in the middle of smoke machines, explosions, lights, fast paced action games, and Michael Buffer announcing.

How it actually played out: an MC struggling to act interested, routine clockwork rounds, an audience of 20 bored parents who were only watching the big screen because it was the only area with chairs to sit down, and quickly being ushered off after not doing well in 2 minutes of Tetris because of the BULLSHIT randomness that gave the kid next to you way more straight line pieces.

stars fer nominal