Long-time readers of the site will know two of the main thrusts undergirding this post already, but they bear repeating:

1 – Starting in youth, I’ve had an interest in older video games. I got introduced to gaming as a young kid through the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis, and as I grew older and started to amass money, I began to build up a collection of retro/vintage/classic games. This collection grew rather sizable over time. This blog began as a place for me to document the games I’d been playing over the course of a given week.

2 – I ended up selling or otherwise donating the bulk of my gaming collection in the Spring of 2022 when my parents moved from my childhood home. I wrote about this in a blog post at the time.

I have not regretted the decision to do this. Most of those games sat basically unused and unplayed for years leading up to the liquidation, so not much changed in my life from losing them. I’ve also significantly reduced the amount of time that I spend playing video games in the past two years, though not necessarily through any concerted effort.

I did not, however, sell my old consoles. I thought I’d get more for them online than through the local game store to whom I sold the games, but I never got around to doing so. Ergo, I never got rid of my old NES, Super Nintendo, Genesis, or any others. They’ve sat boxed, without anything to run, for about two years now. About a month ago, I decided to visit my sister and father’s booth at a local toy show at the fairgrounds. I came in with no intent to purchase anything, but as I made one final lap to leave, I found a vendor selling NES games at fair prices. I picked up a copy of Maniac Mansion and thought ‘why not?’

Later that day, I dug my old NES out of its box, plugged it into the CRT that my grandfather wanted out of his old bedroom, and dove into one of the classics of the point and click adventure genre, only to find that this TV really does not like running Maniac Mansion.

It renders our heroes and heroines into these oblong slouches for some reason. It does nothing to diminish the actual playability of the game, though it diminishes my aesthetic enjoyment of the game enough that I’ve elected to put it aside until I find a better CRT on Facebook marketplace or find some way to remedy the display problem on this one.

I held on to one game in the big purge: A reproduction of the 1990 Nintendo World Championships competition cartridge. It was produced by a company named RetroZone in the late 2000s; I received it as a birthday present in 2009, which is why I didn’t end up selling it with the others in 2022.

The story of the actual Nintendo World Championship of 1990 is sort of auxiliary to the point of this piece, but the main things you’ll need to know are these:

1 – This cartridge contains a sequence of three different games. You begin by collecting 50 coins in Super Mario Bros, then you move on to completing a race in Rad Racer, then finish by scoring as many points as you can in Tetris. Originally, the contest gave players six minutes and eleven seconds to reach as high of a score as possible.

2 – The original Nintendo World Championship cartridges were produced in very meager quantities and only given out to contestants as a sort of consolation prize for participating. Over time, these took on something of a mythical status as the most valuable cartridges in gaming collector circles. PriceCharting lists that a copy of the original was sold for 26,000 dollars in 2019. 

That is mostly what had me so interested in the reproduction cartridge in my youth. The idea of anyone paying five figures for a video game cartridge back then gave the game a sort of mystique that I wanted to handle myself, even if just via a reproduction of the original. I played it frequently in the summer of 2009, but the novelty of it wore off over time and I probably hadn’t played it in over ten years. I had the console set up, I’d elected to table the Maniac Mansion issue until I resolved the visual issue,  and I decided to give the old girl another try. 

It’s a unique playing experience. I explain some of the reasons why it’s a unique playing experience in the above video, but to put it quickly:

The scoring system leaves me to think of Mario and Rad Racer as speed bumps before getting to Tetris. The score in Mario is put into the final total as-is, the score in Rad Racer (which I’ve found to be inflexible, almost always around 6,320 points) is put into the total at a multiplier of ten, and the score in Tetris is put into the total at a multiplier of 25. This means that it’s in the player’s best interest to spend as much time in Tetris as possible, and the least in the prior two games. 

This ends up feeling the strangest in Super Mario Bros. The quickest path to fifty coins in Mario involves intentionally dying to goombas three times in order to stay on the first level and milk a 10-coin block in the middle of the stage. I typically end Mario runs with only 10,300 points or so. When you take into account that every coin collected nets me 200 points, leaving me at a baseline of 10,000 points just to progress, then I end up only having scored 300 points of my own volition. Typically these occur with three strategic goomba kills to put Mario in position to hit particular coin blocks. It’s a strange paradox, as I normally don’t think about a point total at all in Super Mario Bros., and even now that I’m supposed to think about my point total in Super Mario Bros., I end up eschewing it for speed anyway.

Before beginning this initiative, I had a mostly negative opinion on Rad Racer if I had one at all. I only really knew it from the Angry Video Game Nerd’s Power Glove episode, when he puts on the 3D glasses to play it. The 3D functionality was taken out of this version, for the record.

I can remember Rad Racer being the finishing point of many a run on this cartridge back in the summer of 2009. It’s an unforgiving game, presenting my red sports car with a constant influx of ever-swerving green Volkswagen Beetles, but I reached sort of a flow state with it once I managed to memorize these VWs’ movement patterns over weeks of trial-and-error. I’ve enjoyed getting better at it enough that I’ll probably pick it up and try to play through the full game if I can find a cheap copy somewhere. 

I learned (from the instruction manual that came with the game) that the NES Tetris introduces blocks to the player on set patterns, rather than using some sort of random block generation system, and this particular version of Tetris, stripped down from the full game to fit its limited partition on the cartridge, only includes four or five block patterns.

I’ve just learned from re-reading the manual that the patterns are decided by the score with which one finishes Super Mario Bros. I get my preferred pattern at that 10,300 point-total for which I shoot. I wish I had properly interpreted that information earlier on in this whole process (I say ‘properly interpreted’ rather than ‘known’ because I definitely read the paragraph in which that is stated but never seemed to have that information imprinted on my mind), as I could’ve controlled better for that and saved myself a headache.

I took to intentionally trying to memorize (or, at the very least, get a decent gist of the flow of) each block pattern and found myself becoming more intentional and successful in my Tetris play. I don’t think I’ve been this good at the game since the days of Tetris Friends on Facebook back in 2008.

I started playing daily on April 22nd. I integrated it into my morning routine, starting a run right after I’d wake up, marking that score, and then marking any higher scores if I got them over the course of the remainder of the day. The relatively short span of time that the game takes up makes it a perfect brief time-sink for a person like me, who can sit down, play a few runs in less than half of an hour, all the while seeing improvements bare themselves out on the yellow legal pad upon which I wrote my scores. After about a two-week span, I got the idea to write a blog post about the endeavor. I’d written “World Champion” on the first line of the legal pad, a phrase which took on the unofficial name of the endeavor to chase a one-million point total.

I thought the post could benefit from an accompanying video in which I’d talk the viewer through what I was doing.  The first of these is here:

I enjoyed making this video so much that I figured I’d just film all of my runs from there on out. I grew to enjoy the act of talking over the gameplay. I haven’t done that sort of thing, just talked over a game, since the peak of COVID in 2020. It quickly devolved into free-associative rabbit chasing about sketch comedy and word usage and annoyance with the internet, among other things, but I had fun. I’ve compiled them into a playlist here.

My scores grew over time, too. I had but a meager 164,055 on April 13th. I broke 200,000 the next day with 272,090. 300 and 400,000 the day after with 471,925. I broke the half-million mark on April 19th with 526,525. On April 22nd, I figured out that I could increase my acceleration speed in Rad Racer by holding up on the directional pad, which led me to break the 700,000 and 800,000 point mark, peaking with a personal best of 812,665 at the end of the evening. That 800,000 mark eluded me for over a week; I only re-broke my personal record on the 30th with a score of at least 880,000 (I dropped the controller, accidentally tilting the cartridge out of place and rendering the screen a glitchy mess when I leaned over to get my notepad to write down the full score).

I wanted to publish this piece as sort of an announcement of the project, to notify readers that you can watch along with me in the chase for the million, but Friday, May 4th, 2024 proved eventful. I began my day — well, the cat with whom I live began my day for me by meowing for food in the hallway at 6:20AM. I followed that up with maybe my worst coffee spill of my life prior to the first run. I’m talking a full mug of Seattle’s Best No. 5 slipped from between my fingers and onto the floor, sending coffee flying fucking everywhere right as I got set to start the first run, staining my yellow notepad. I soldiered on after getting on my hands and knees with a bath towel and scrubbing at it as well as I could — The first few runs brought little, cut short by my need to head to work. I stopped and did a few runs between the work day and a semester-end work-social event. I came back home and hung out with my roommate until about 12:30am, when I sat back down at my little chair — oh, I should add in that I did all of this from a spartan setup of a padded folding chair from CostCo pointed at my little TV on an endtable probably from IKEA that I inherited from my sister — and began the session which brought me the run that ended it all.

I spent the whole run discussing shitty jobs I held in high school and college, hardly befitting of the historical moment in which I was living. I managed to eke out two late Tetrises with less than twenty seconds left in the run to get me up over 42,000 points in Tetris, which, combined with Mario and Rad Racer, gave me a final total score of 1,140,015 points. It was 1:00am on May 4th, 2024, and I had reached my goal.

That early success unintentionally turned this post into a retrospective rather than an announcement of a work-in-progress, but I’m glad to be finished with it. I was getting tired of looping those same three games over and over again, and if I hadn’t finished the deal within like a week, I probably would’ve burnt out on the entire ordeal. Regardless, I did it!

What did I learn from this experience? I suspect relatively little. I definitely improved at one video game (I was already passable at Super Mario Bros. and Tetris). I also enjoyed the experience of playing a (relatively) new video game for the first time in months. This may sound odd, given the information with which I started the post, but I’ve fallen into disinterest with gaming in the last year or so. At most, I’ve replayed a few games that I already knew well. I’m not that disappointed or even confused by this, as I can draw a direct line from over-exposure to gaming during COVID lockdowns in 2020 to my diminishing returns with them starting in early 2022. It was nice, though, to be drawn to playing a video game again.

And, you know what? Maybe I enjoyed the video-commentary experience enough that I’ll continue it as I play through Maniac Mansion.