Patrick Scott Patterson's Failed Nintendo World Championships 2015 Bid Sums Up What's So Great About The Event

Patrick Scott Patterson is one of the most recognisable faces in video gaming fandom, and has appeared many times in various forms of media in order to celebrate our hobby and share his own personal love of the industry. Like so many hopefuls over the past weekend, Patterson took part in a Nintendo World Championships 2015 qualifying event in the hope of making it to the final at E3, and his quest sums up perfectly why competitions of this kind can bring out the best in people.

In an exhaustive report written by Patterson himself, he explains that his history with the previous Nintendo World Championships spurred him on to try his hand again, 25 years later. Prior to travelling to his local Best Buy, he was pretty confident:

I decided I'd take my shot at the surprise revival of the event at the Dallas Best Buy location that was hosting one of the eight city qualifiers. Going into the event my best score of 7,000,500 points on the Nintendo 3DS version of the Ultimate NES Remix Championship Mode was a top five score and my best of 7.5 million on it is one of the best Wii U version's best known scores. I had as good of a shot as anyone.

After arriving early and queuing in torrential rain, Patterson finally made it into the store, where things didn't go according to plan:

Dr. Mario gave me one of the worst possible series of screens, seeing me put in a paltry 2.6 million point score. I turned around and kicked the Best Buy store shelf behind me, shaking my head. The rep tried to tell me that it was a good score but I didn't agree. I wanted to post at least 4 million if not 5 million or higher as I'd done for weeks in practice, but no dice.

Seeing that the high score for that particular Best Buy location was 5.5 million, Patterson walked away dejected. However, he would later learn from social media that the score was actually a mistake, and the real high score for Dallas was in fact 2.8 million. This put an idea in his head:

The San Francisco event only had 150 or so people come out, so they were allowing people who'd tried before to try again. I called my local Best Buy to see if I could speak to the Nintendo reps but was denied. The manager there confirmed to me that it was "one try per person" but in hearing my story, he suggested I call Nintendo myself.

My wife drove like Bo Duke after an all night bender of Red Bull as she dodged traffic and Dallas floodwaters to get me back to the Best Buy. While that was going on, a supervisor at Nintendo confirmed to me that there was nothing in the official rules that said "one play per person" and that she would call the stores to confirm that player could try again.

I came in to find that the 2.8 million score was still the top one, and confirmed with the reps that Nintendo had called and said we could try again. So off I went, signing up again to retry for my chance at winning.

This is where the story gets really interesting. Patterson destroyed the previous score, but it wasn't quite over yet:

I quickly took the lead with a 4.4 million point score. As Nintendo took my photo, up came the previous leader Jordan DeMarco. You could say he wasn't happy to see that I got another try and him and his friends reacted as such. My attempts to tell them that this was Nintendo's call and that replays had been happening in San Fran didn't go through. They believed that I was trying to pull something and the tension became thick.

Things threatened to get a little ugly, with DeMarco's friends apparently trying their hardest to put Patterson off his game:

One of Jordan's friends signed back up as well, standing next to me and trying to watch my game play and talk to me. It was a sure attempt at mind games and trolling that, at first, I was focusing past. It did begin to get to me, though, as my heart began to pound in my chest. I asked him to back off of me several times, finally issuing a statement of "I'm asking you one more time to get out of my space." The Nintendo reps, believing this might come to blows now, finally suggested it stop as I repeated that I was not pulling a fast one here, I was simply playing under the rules that Nintendo said I could.

Patterson posted a score of 5.2 million and assumed he had won, but his rival pulled something special out of the bag right at the end - and instead of being aggravated, Patterson claims he was in fact the exact opposite:

The dry erase marker of my 5.2 million point score wasn't even dry as he hit a 6.1 million point score on what was literally his last try. I was getting one final game in as I learned the news, which made me grin more than it made me upset. That game didn't give me what I needed to beat Jordan's new score. Game over.

I went up to Jordan, who was turned around from me at the time. The Nintendo reps stood silent as I turned him about slightly. I reached out and shook his hand which brought us to a Rocky and Apollo Creed like embrace. I told him I respected the hell out of him for not quitting and congratulated him as those who'd stuck around broke out in applause and began to take photos.

Ironically, Patterson - who was dumped out of the original championships in heartbreaking fashion all those years ago - claims that this event represents a form of closure:

Hey, maybe the 2015 Nintendo World Championships wasn't nearly the scale or hype of the original one 25 years ago. Maybe some people aren't going to understand why I'm not upset at a last second loss or the fact that Nintendo seemingly shifted the rules mid-day in what is going to prove to be a super controversial call for years to come.

But I found what I was looking for. I got my closure for both my disappointed 14-year-old self from 1990 and for myself today. I can finally put down that big bag of rocks and move on forever from the idea of competing on video games. I made new friends and got what I needed.

You can't create moments like this. They only come from live competition, not from Twitch streams or recordings played back for online scoreboards and YouTube fans.

Patterson's story could well be typical of many other stories which were forged over the past weekend, but we've focused on it here because for us, it sums up what events like these are all about - gamers coming together to celebrate their hobby and create unlikely friendships in the process.