Around the early 1990’s, it wasn’t terribly uncommon to find video game tournaments scattered around the country, focusing on the ol’ NES. Heck, there was an entire movie about one such (fictional) contest. I even participated in (and lost) my fair share of local competitions, but one that I never was able to find around my old stomping grounds is the Nintendo Campus Challenge.
A couple of cups from the Nintendo Campus Challenge
Above are some cups that I managed to get hold of from this challenge, and, in fact, were the first that I had actually heard of the thing. It turns out that in the NES’s heyday (1991, it seems), Nintendo sponsored a video game tournament held, you guessed it, primarily at universities. And since I was 12 years old at the time, I didn’t really spend a whole lot of times at college campuses. But if one did spend time at one of the campuses where this event was held, you might have played a special cartridge where you got to compete in portions of several NES games (Pin-Bot, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Dr. Mario) and get the highest score possible, for the chance to win Big Money. You might have even had the opportunity to drink out of one of these cups.
Well, probably not one of these specific cups, but you get the idea.