Nintendo Powerfest '94 Photos taken by Jeff Arensmeyer

Nintendo did a number of competitions in the 90s, but there were only two that were considered World Championships (despite them taking place entirely in the United States). The first one plenty of people know about as the Nintendo World Championships 1990, with several articles, photos and videos (even a documentary directed by one of the finalists who talks about the event) as well as the NES carts from that competition being highly sought after and catalogued.

However, there was one other: Powerfest '94. Like NWC, this competition required players to get the best score on a specially made cartridge featuring three games: Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Kart and Home Run Derby from Ken Griffy Jr. Major League Baseball. Highest scorers from each venue would be awarded several prizes included a copy of the newly released Donkey Kong Country and a trip to San Diego where they would compete in the main tournament, the grand prize was $3,000 and a Mustang. While we do have at least one video from one of the qualification rounds, a few photos and scans here and there, and two of the 32 cartridges from the competition have been found and reproduced, it's not as a plentiful state as the more well-known NWC 1990.

That brings me to one of the competitors, Jeff Arensmeyer. He was one of the 132 competitors who got to travel to San Diego for the main tournament, where he was in Team Cyclone. A long time ago he wrote an article for the long defunct website Video Game Fever detailing what went on during the trip to San Diego. I remember reading the website finding his story very interesting, especially since he included several photos and even some voice clips of what was happening. I cannot recall exactly when the website went defunct (Wayback machine suggests around 2009), but I remember not finding it for ages and forgetting about it until recently when a conversation on the NWC 1990 came up again.

I managed to find the original link after searching his name with Nintendo PowerFest 94 and located another former competitor's website, Richard Burns, which happened to use the Video Game Fever website as a source. The good news is that putting this link from Video Game Fever into the Wayback Machine, I was able to find a capture of the website with the full text dating from around 2007. The bad news is that all media but two of the image files were captured (I've attached the two to save anyone else for digging to find them). This is a bit of a shame because it would be nice to look through the photos of someone that was there, as well as a scan from the Nintendo Power article about the competition, a photo shoot of all four teams that were in the San Diego tournament and a plaque that all competitors of the main tournament received.

The only other photos I found by chance happened to be from a blog ran by Jeff's wife, I recognise one of the found photos on the site to be a higher quality scan, so I presume the other ones on the blog might be higher quality scans of those that were in Jeff's original article as well.

So I guess this would be partially found, but it would be nice to find more information about this competition for the sake of video game history.