Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition player used glitch to achieve Donkey Kong record

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was released two weeks ago on Switch, and there’s already some controversy brewing. It seems that the current record holder in the NES edition of Donkey Kong abused a glitch exploit in order to achieve their position on the leaderboards.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the player in question found a way to climb to the top of the first Donkey Kong stage in only 15 seconds by making use of invisible ladders. (If it wasn’t obvious, those ladders are not in fact meant to exist or be usable.)

In most cases if Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition detects that a glitch has been used, it will simply force rewind the game and stop the player from getting a leaderboard spot that way. However, for some reason this Donkey Kong glitch doesn’t ring any alarm bells. Perhaps Nintendo isn’t aware of the glitch, or simply neglected to have it trigger the forced rewind by mistake.

Hopefully, this will be fixed in a future update to the game. Although speedrunners often make use of similar glitches in games, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition’s aim seems to be to level the playing field by disallowing these more complicated maneuvers.

For a closer look at exactly how this glitch was carried out, check out the videos below (first clip beginning at the 1:50:00 mark):