Any game collector worth his salt knows about the 1990 Nintendo World Championships and the associated cartridge. Considered the single-most sought after game in existence, the 26 gold and 90 grey editions of the cartridge were distributed to the winners of a Nintendo Power contest and the finalists of the 1990 championships respectively, and they continue to fetch top dollar at auction.
Considerably less attention is paid to the 1990 NWC's successors. In 1991 and 1992, Nintendo hosted the "Campus Challenge", a tournament that travelled to university campuses across the United States in an attempt to market video games to older gamers. Nintendo apparently took a break in 1993 before returning in 1994 with the Powerfest '94 competition.
Similar to the 1990 championships, each of these competitions had its own unique cartridge, which was a hybrid of three popular games for the NES (in '91) or SNES (in '92 and '94). Contestants had to play through specific scenarios set in each game for ~6 minutes with the objective being to get the highest score possible. However, unlike in 1990, the cartridges used for the contests were never formally released. Instead, at the conclusion of each of the competitions, the cartridges were scrapped for parts, with only a few escaping the purge.
Today, only a single copy of the '91 and '92 carts exist. The 1994 cartridge fared a little better, with two copies having been unearthed (though, oddly enough, the scoring mechanisms for the two copies are slightly different, making each cartridge unique). All four carts are now owned by collectors and, though they have occasionally been placed on auction sites (usually with six-figure asking prices), none have changed hands for a number of years.
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