Some Classic game tournament ideas pls

[Nightram]

I'm gearing up to do a monthly game night for all my friends. We've had one already that featured a lot of modern games and was a BLAST!. Modern games are easy to do parties with though, because they're built for more than 2 players (for the most part) and provide great activity for several people at once whether watching or playing.

Can anyone suggest how to do a multiplayer tournament with classic games?
I want to do some NES and SNES games that are 2p, but set up a tourney with rounds and such.

What would be the best way to go about it and what games would suit it best?
I'm thinking fighting and racing games would be fairly easy, but I want to do a feature night of "Tetris throughout the Ages" as well (and the like).

I also want to feature the Twin Famicom I got somehow, but that will be difficult with the short cords it has to do multiplay.

Any ideas?

[jcheatle]

My friends and I had planned to do something like this a while back except bringing it straight through from the 2600 to today. We never did, though. Point is that I've thought about this question myself and there are plenty of older games that work well here.

As for how to do it, there's always single / double elimination, round robin, etc. If you look around online, you can find brackets. Some of the games move much more quickly than others, so I might suggest best of three or best of five series for each matchup. You can obviously adjust accordingly. Some of the games we considered using:

Combat - 2600
Tecmo Super Bowl - NES
Dr. Mario - NES
Alternatively, Tetris and Dr. Mario - SNES, which has a head-to-head mode built in.
Super Mario Kart battle mode - I prefer SNES, but you could go with the N64 or Gamecube, too.
Mortal Kombat II - Genesis
Mutant League Football - Genesis... fun gameplay, unique rosters making it still fun today unlike, say, Madden 94
Goldeneye - N64 You could go head-to-head or up to four players at once if you had more
Virtua Tennis - Dreamcast
Soul Calibur - Dreamcast

There's lots more but these are some of my favorites off the top of my head.

[CartCollector]

The Bomberman series is a good place to start. You'd probably want to get a 4P adapter for that, though. I've heard Smash TV is a good NES multiplayer game, along with Super Dodge Ball and Super Spike V'Ball (the latter being Four Score compatible). NES Tennis is fun also, if a bit dated. Maybe you could have a Super Mario Bros. tournament where the person that gets the farthest through the game wins, with ties being decided by points? That could take a while though.

I think you should also do something featuring the Atari 2600, sice a lot of the games for that were multiplayer, especially the earlier ones. Good games that come to mind are Surround, Sky Diver, Warlords, and the original deathmatch, Combat. If you don't have one, you could pick all of those games up for the PS2 or XBox for less than $20 in Atari Anthology.

[Blitzwing256]

super street figther 2 for the snes had a multiplayer tournament for up to 16 people, might be a good one to start with

[DefaultGen]

.....

[Nightram]

How can you not mention getting a Nintendo World Championship repro :)

Yeah, THAT'S gonna happen. Heh.

Thanks for the thoughts guys! I'll let you know what happens with it. I like the brackets idea, and figured that the internet hold the key to it. Just needed game suggestions. Now I have a good starting point. Thanks.