What started out as a sarcastic suggestion turned into a three-year mission for half-Polish, half-Mexican Piotr Delgado Kusielczuk, more commonly known as The Mexican Runner.
Popular for a variety of speedrunning records, including for Contra and Battletoads, Kusielczuk is now almost at the end of his NES Mania project, wherein he challenged himself to beat all NES games ever released.
How NES Mania Started
According to Kusielczuk, he started to feel burnt out from speedrunning video games as he had been intensely playing Super Castlevania IV for a month back in May 2014.
As The Mexican Runner started formulating ideas on what else he could stream aside from speed runs, he was disappointed to only be coming up with plans for casual playthroughs, which he hated because he wanted to have a goal in mind.
However, in a call with some friends from Chile who were speedrunners themselves, there was a sarcastic suggestion for Kusielczuk to "do the A-Z that Big Jon does," which he responded to by saying that he did not like the fact that the video games are only being played for a few minutes. There was then another sarcastic suggestion for Kusielczuk to beat all the NES games.
It was then that NES Mania was born.
The Challenges Of NES Mania
Kusielczuk started NES Mania on May 28, 2014, with a list of 679 titles released in North America and 35 titles released only in PAL regions for a total of 714 NES games that he was looking to complete. For those that did not have strict win conditions, Kusielczuk decided to play them until the game started looping or until no further progress can be made.
Looking back on the classic NES titles, it would seem that NES Mania was an easy project to accomplish. However, Kusielczuk compared the experience to a child who thought of climbing a mountain without really thinking about all the consequences.
"When I was playing around game 50 I started to realize that the project could take years," Kusielczuk said.
The longest time that he spent playing a NES game was 91 hours, and it was on Miracle Piano Teaching System. The game was designed to teach children how to play the piano, and to complete it, he had to actually teach himself how to play the piano. Other titles that Kusielczuk spent a significant amount of time on include Championship Pool, a billiards game that took 39 hours to beat, Ikari Warriors, a shooter that took him 37 1/2 hours to complete, and popular puzzler Q*Bert, which took over 16 hours.
NES Mania Drawing To A Close
After almost three years since NES Mania started, the project is nearing its end. At noon on Feb. 26, Kusielczuk is planning to stream the completion of the last game on his list, and it is none other than Super Mario Bros. 3.
Once he finishes the last game, Kusielczuk will carve his name in the video game history books as the first person to have ever beaten all NES games ever released.
