8-Bit Awesomeness: Nintendo Madness, Tomorrow Night at the Avant Garden

Very, very cool. I’ve been away from video games for a couple of decades now, sadly, but in my quasi-misspent youth, I played a fair amount, both on our back-in-the-day Atari and our now-venerable Nintendo Entertainment System. Some days, I truly miss Legend of Zelda; I swear, I used to play that damn game in my dreams…sigh.

Anyway, if you also think longingly back to those days (or just love video games in general), well, starting at 8PM tomorrow night (Saturday, October 26th) at the Avant Garden, a group that’s calling itself the Lazybit Collective will be hosting their First Annual Nintendo Championship Party. It’s meant to be like the original Nintendo World Championships — which I missed out on, myself — with somewhere between 12 and 20 NESes and TVs set up and a slew of Nintendo games to play for just a couple of bucks.

The full $5 gets you into one of the tournaments, which are for Super Mario Bros. 3 or Tetris, apparently, and placing in one of ’em gets you a real-live trophy. Hot damn… Oh, and there’s something about a Nintendo-themed costume party beforehand, so dress up like your favorite Mario character or something, too.

Best of all, the group is hoping this will be only the first of these sorts of events — get on out there and support some old-school videogaming, and with a little luck, this thing will take off.