Mental Floss

Dedicated Fan Spent Three Years Beating All 714 NES Games

By Jason Serafino

William Warby
William Warby / William Warby
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Beating one of those old, deceptively hard NES games is an impressive enough accomplishment for most people, but one fan had bigger aspirations than that. Much bigger. Over the past three years, Piotr Delgado Kusielczuk—who goes by the Twitch handle "The Mexican Runner"—set out to complete all 714 games ever released on the NES. The journey started on Kusielczuk's Twitch channel on May 28, 2014 and came to an end nearly three years later on February 26, 2017.

The whole thing kicked off with the 1990 game Whomp 'Em, which Kusielczuko finished in two hours and 11 minutes, and it ended with a Super Mario Bros. 3 run that he completed in an hour and 43 minutes (Kusielczuk chose it because he says it's the best game on the system).

Watch live video from TheMexicanRunner on www.twitch.tvIn between, Kusielczuk finished each and every game to ever be released on the system, including the 679 titles released in the United States and the other 35 PAL exclusives, according to Engadget. The whole endeavor clocked in at 3435 hours, but it was helped along by the fact that Kusielczuk is a known speed-runner.

Speed-running is a video game trend where players attempt to complete a game in record time, with no attention paid to gameplay goals or other accomplishments. Times are often aided through glitches found in the game, which can significantly cut down on the length. The problem with NES games is that many of them—like Tetris—don't have traditional endings; they just keep going and going. For those titles, Kusielczuk played until there was simply nothing left to do and the game started going in a loop. That means he could beat a game like Battletoads in less than a half hour, but something more nebulous like Miracle Piano Teaching System took an astounding 91 hours.

Watch live video from TheMexicanRunner on www.twitch.tvIt's assumed that Kusielczuk is the first person to play and beat all 714 NES games, and he is definitely the first person to document it in such a public way. Don't look for Kusielczuk to follow suit with an SNES run, though. On his site, he said, "NES has probably the hardest game library of any other console, so it wouldn't be that challenging to me." That's the type of boasting you earn after 3400 hours with a controller in your hand. 

[h/t: Engadget]