World-ranked NHL '94 gamers ready for another shot at 16-bit glory
King of 94 tournament takes place this weekend in Toronto
One of the organizers of the annual world championships for the classic hockey video game NHL '94 says the tournament continues to grow — and this year, for the first time ever, it will include gamers from outside North America.
The King of 94 tournament, which first started in 2015, takes place this weekend in Toronto.
It's played on Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo consoles and controllers — just like when the game was first released in 1993.
Darrell Sampson of Saskatoon, who organizes the tournament along with Michael Capewell of Ottawa, said this year's event will also feature players from Sweden.
"Which is really cool," Sampson said. "They knew about the tournament for a long time. Just timing, finances — those things didn't line up. But this year, they're making a big trip out of it."
Sampson said they will compete against gamers from across Canada and the United States — from B.C. to Nova Scotia, and from California and Texas to the U.S. Midwest and northeast.
Sampson is one of two participants from Saskatchewan, which has eight players in the top 60 of the NHL '94 world rankings for the Super Nintendo, including six from Saskatoon. Sampson, who is ranked 30th, recently noticed only Toronto has more gamers in the top 30 than Saskatoon.
"It's interesting about the rankings. Why that is, I don't know," he laughed. "Maybe longer winters, a lot more time to practise."
Sampson said that before they knew about each other and played in local tournaments together, he remembers once playing online against a gamer now in the top 30, Cory Hill, and asking him where he was from.
"He said, 'Oh, Saskatoon.' I was like, 'Oh, I'm from Saskatoon,'" Sampson said. "And I said, 'Where do you work?' And then I found out we work a block away from each other."
Sampson said that, over the years, they've found the best players in the Super Nintendo version of NHL '94 are typically from Canada, while the top players in the Sega Genesis version are usually from the United States. (The games had the same title, but different developers.)
"We don't know why that is," he said. "Maybe Sega was more heavily marketed in the United States, I'm not sure."
Sampson said that while NHL '94 is a simple game, the level of play has advanced to where it feels like playing chess, because the gamers are trying to make each other guess what they're going to do.
He said the tournament is open to anyone, but they've found that players who don't do well don't typically come back, while the ones that do well return every year.
'My heart was pounding': competitor
Dan Benesh, a world-ranked player from Regina who is also participating in the tournament this weekend, said his first NHL '94 tournament was a smaller event in Minneapolis.
"It was such a contrast from the feeling that you get playing with your friends in your basement — [when] you're very comfortable, you're laughing, you're joking, everything is fun," he said.
"My heart was pounding. I was feeling a sense of fear, like, 'Wow, all of these players are very good.'"
Benesh, who is ranked 23rd in the world for the Sega Genesis version, said the best NHL '94 competitors have played it "a lot" by themselves, "into the odd hours."
"To be the best, to be elite at this game, you really have to be able to beat the computer every single time," he said. "And not only that, you should really be able to beat the computer, like 20-0 or 20-1."
He said once you learn how to score on the computer, the next steps are learning how to defend all of those moves, then adjusting to other gamers' defence, then learning how to fake.
"The best players in the game are the ones that are just so deep into your head that they know what you're going to do before you even know," he said.
Despite the competition, he said the very best players are "absolutely open books" in online communities, where you can ask anything and play almost any time.
"That's kind of what's cool about NHL '94 is that maybe there's only a couple hundred people that are striving to be the best at it around the world," he said. "And it really makes it feel attainable to put in some time and to improve your skills at it."
Every move is fair game
Benesh said there are a couple of known glitches in the game that don't make sense and are against tournament etiquette to exploit — but generally, every move is fair game, including some moves some less experienced players might consider "cheap."
"The thing about the game that makes it so great is for every 'cheap' move, there is a thing that you can do to combat against it," he said. "So if you are not doing those things to combat against the 'cheap' moves, you are not going to be elite."
Benesh said one player even busted out an unknown move in last year's King of 94 tournament. He had discovered a weird combination of button presses not in the instruction manual that allowed him to do a fake shot. He unveiled the move to fake out an opponent and score a goal.
"That was quite momentous, being that nobody really knew about that for 28 years," Benesh said. "And this guy just invented it and then did it in a tournament.
"The place went crazy."
Benesh said he's still playing the Sega Genesis console from his childhood that was paid for with recycled beer and pop cans.
"It's really amazing now being 40 years old and being able to play it with my son and have him experience and enjoy the game, too," he said.
He said that joy and nostalgia is palpable at tournaments like King of 94.
"You can feel it," he said. "Everyone there is playing this game now because they played it when they were six to 17 years old.
"It's really a magical thing. It truly is."
Spectators can watch this weekend's tournament in person at the arcade bar FreePlay Toronto. The event, including commentary, is also being livestreamed on Twitch.
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