My Day at the 1990 Powerfest

By: J.D. Turbeville
LordJD My Day at the 1990 Powerfest

What most people don’t know about me is that I attended and was a competitor in the 1990 Powerfest held at Universal Studios in southern California. I decided to go after watching several local promotional ads and a show that showed what the place was like. It was video game heaven! Every new and upcoming game imaginable, every Nintendo character to shake hands with, and every memory to cherish for ages! I just had to go! I begged my parents and on one October weekend, made our venture.

We arrived at Universal Studios pretty early in the morning. In fact, before the opening, so we had to wait outside. A few minutes later, we obtained our tickets and went into the complex. Taking the normal tram ride as always through the place was the first order of business following our tradition. Yay for gunfights, going inside studios, and of course your favorite friend King Kong.

After our ride, we searched for the warehouse of heaven. Pretty big place as expected. Hard to know the dimensions, but it seemed like 1/2 a football field to me as a kid. The first game that I played was World Class Track Meet. This was a modified game and the lady let me keep my shoes on … heh heh. It was a 2-player game, but the 2nd player was modified to become the computer. Pretty easy match, but the computer was a tad harder. Off to the next game!

I walked by some familiar games like SMB2 and review counters like the “new” Gameboy and the upcoming next generation system that was going to blow away the Genesis (SNES to the unobvious), but the most reveling game met me at the warehouse: River City Ransom!

It was a very different game that I’ve ever played before. The characters looked interesting, the plot was great, and best of all was being able to crack your enemies with lead pipes and bike chains! I continued playing this game till they shut off all the systems for their “45 min reboot”. Oh well, we went off to the gaming center to start the competition.

The place kinda looked like a high school graduation of all things. The center had the days semi-finalists playing SMB3 and hidden behind them was the qualifying screens. I had to sign some card with my name and for my work, I picked between a Mario and Luigi plushie (I choose Mario of course. Now where is that sucker today?). I embarked on the most pressure that a video gamer had to face of its time — having to qualify in the first round of this video game tournament! It wasn’t you against the competition, it was you against the baseline score of 195000 set by the tournament committee. Five minutes, 195000 was the goal to reach. The following paragraph is a synopsis of my qualification:

Mind you that I had no idea what the games were before playing, so I had to read the game cart as it was being displayed on the screen quickly, so I was at a disadvantage. In SMB, I just ran as fast as I could through the game collecting coins at an alarming rate. I got the mushroom at the beginning to have that power-up. I went through the pipe before the 1-up spot and landed all the coins and proceeded to complete the challenge. Time was ticking and I was losing patience b/c I hit the flag on 1-1 and had to wait crucial seconds for the garbage that you usually wait for (Mario goes into castle, Mario goes out of castle and into the pipe for 1-2, fireworks, etc). I spent very short time in 1-2 as I reached the 50 coins right there.

Next game: finish Rad Racer’s first course. Pretty simple here. I’ve played this game enough times at the dentists office to have no problem with it. I did get knocked once on a sharp turn going at max speed though.

Final game: play Tetris till time expires. My dreaded nightmare! At this point, it was my first time ever playing this dreaded game. I was shocked and didn’t even know what to do. I was just placing lines everywhere and getting lucky by scoring a couple of lines before time expired.

The final score? 195500!! I made it! I made it! I’m in the semi-finals tomorrow! The dude congratulated me and escorted me to my parents explaining the process that would have to take place tomorrow. Meet coordinators, find your playing time, etc etc … I was ready to play in front of a crowd, I was ready to conquer the game that everyone wanted to play — SMB3.

After the chat with the tournament official with my parents explaining the details of tomorrow, I understood that I had to be there strictly at a certain time or I was disqualified from further competition. Also, I would be playing the newest NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 which I couldn’t even practice, so I’d be playing the tournament with no experience in the game and would be rusty as I didn’t practice that morning.

It was Sunday and we went back to Universal Studios, Hollywood for the semi-final showdown. I was obviously nervous when we signed up with the tournament director. My mouth and body was shivering although it was a hot day. I was only two steps away from the NWC!! I had to wait about two hours until my match and it felt like the longest two hours of my life. I was stressing it out by pacing back and forth. My mom had to force-feed me so that I could have proper nutrition.

Well two hours passed and the director found me with my parents and called me over to prompt some instructions. It was nothing much — just some rules about the competition. I had learned that I would have to score the most points in SMB3 in 5 minutes out of a group of three opponents to continue in the tournament. It was pretty much the same exact instance from the movie, The Wizard so you know what I had to go through in order to win.

About 30 minutes later, I got into my seat and had the controller in my hand practicing button and direction reflexes to warm my hands up as they were dead cold from the waiting time. My opponents were also doing the same thing. The announcer made everyone cheer and the game was on! He announced our names, hometown, age, and our hobbies (from the stat sheet they made us fill out previously). The announcer then told everyone our game was SMB3 and we had 5 minutes to play through it for qualification. The following is as best as I can remember my walkthrough of the 5 min of SMB3:

They started us out at the world 1 screen so we had to waste 10 seconds getting into world 1-1. The beginning looked similar to SMB, so I just walked moderately through the level never seeing it ever in my life. I knew I had to get the most points, so I bopped almost every “?” box that there was getting credit for obtaining the coins and power-up items. Halfway through the level, I became raccoon Mario and racked up some major pts jumping on the green koopa troopas and paratroopas that were there. I pretty much just ran the rest of the level and ended it. I was trying to concentrate as hard as I could, so I wasn’t looking at the time left or how far behind or ahead my opponents were at this time. I’m pretty sure I had used more than two minutes of the allotted time to complete 1-1.

Now off to 1-2, about 10-15 goes away using up the world screen. Bah, I hate that. Anyways, level 1-2 as you know has massive scoring if you use raccoon Mario to jump continuously and hit the goombas over and over again. Of course I didn’t know that as it was my first time, but I did get some points off that method. The time was winding down, so I didn’t wanna waste time in one area for so long. I did go into the pipe where the P-switch was located and reaped the coins from below, so that was good. Yet, the warp takes you back a few feet which was the bad part about it. Anyways, there wasn’t anything else interesting about this level other than getting the Starman and running through the rest of the level and finishing it.

Now, I had a choice with the less than 60 seconds left on the timer. I could either go to level 1-3, level 1-4, or go to the first fortress. Using the knowledge that I have now, I probably would’ve went to level 1-3 because I could run through the level since it was short and score the timer bonus, but I went into the fortress probably thinking I was gonna get through all of world 1. Silly me, that wasn’t the smartest thing to do. I entered the level and instantly got smacked by a podboo since I was panicking and had to run through the level. I instantly regained Super Mario with the mushroom nearby, but there had to be less than 30 seconds remaining. I just became suicidal and ran thinking that this was my only chance to do anything for the win. I got the second power-up and reached the door, saw the spikes, and the screen froze, ending the match. I breathed out a large sigh of relief and just stretched by arms back awaiting the result. It took them about less than a minute to write down the scores and verify them, but I wasn’t announced as the winner. Boo hoo, I should’ve done my practicing. We all left to an applause and my parents did the normal “You did a good job” blah blah blah bit. I was sorta in tears, but I wasn’t that bad in shambles. I did become one of the top 10% of NES players in the US presumably by reaching this far in the Powerfest.

Thus the journey to the NWC and my hand at one of those cartridges was lost. At the time I didn’t know how far I could go, I just knew that I’d be going farther and farther with each win. The epilogue of this story is that my dad purchased River City Ransom and SMB3 and I beat the former in 6 days and the latter in 2 wks. (by warping), but I’ll always remember the weekend I had. Although some of us remember that there were more tournaments such as the local Captron ones (which I did participate in one for F-Zero), the Blockbuster SNES/Genesis, the Starfox tournament, and the 1994 Powerfest (which I didn’t go to because they weren’t playing anywhere locally to my knowledge), the first ever national tournament that started it all was the best. These days, I rarely get to play any NES games as it is, but I will always remember the day that I played SMB3 for the first time in that special way.