There are probably few esports games as suitable for school audiences as Nintendo games are. Traditionally violence-free, they combine bright colours and gaming fun with a decent challenge and skill requirements at higher difficulty tiers.
As such, it’s hardly surprising to hear that three of them – fighting game hit Super Smash Bros Ultimate, racer Mario Kart 8, and paintball shooter Splatoon 2 are making their way into high school varsity athletics.
PlayVS and Nintendo partner up
Nintendo is bringing these three games to high school varsity esports levels in the near future. The new partnership with PlayVS plans to bring their games to varsity athletics this autumn.
“What’s magical about this opportunity is that it’s a way for kids to participate, to compete against their peer levels, and to do so as part of high school athletics,” said Nintendo’s Bill Trinen.
PlayVS is an amateur esports platform that has long-standing partnerships with US high school athletic and esports associations. They already have several esports competitive tiers and brackets, and cover three age groups – youth, high school and college. For the older kids, they already offer competitions in games like Fortnite, Overwatch and League of Legends. With the new Nintendo partnership, they’ll also be able to offer even more youth-friendly titles for competitions in those age ranges.
New games, new competitions
Both Splatoon 2 and Smash Bros Ultimate will be official parts of the varsity sports program as of September 20th this year. Fans of Mario Kart will have to wait a little longer – it will be added early in 2022. All three games as well as Switch Online subscriptions will be offered to more than 3000 qualifying schools so that their kids can play.
This isn’t completely new though – in many cases, these games were already being played in amateur tournaments at local levels, however w
Esports.net
