Nintendo Champ, John Mulhausen, Joins Xbox Team

If you’re a gaming geek, then you may have heard of John Mulhausen. In 1990, when he was only 11 years old, he made a name for himself as a Nintendo champion. That year, Nintendo had announced they were having a world championship and John decided to go to the nearest competition to him which was in Dallas. The challenge involved playing 7 minutes of Super Mario and getting 50 coins, playing Red Racer and finishing the first track, and then playing Tetris. “It was like the triathlon of Nintendo gaming,” he says. He made the semi-finals and finished up as third in his age group. He even got to shake hands with the president of Nintendo. To this day, he still has in his possession the cool Nintendo t-shirt which the winners received.

Recently, John joined the Xbox team at Microsoft as a SDET (Software Design Engineer in Test) where he gets to work with Xbox developers supporting every studio that Microsoft publishes. He calls it his “dream job.” The Microspotting blog has a great interview up with John where he talks about both the job and the Nintendo championship in more detail.

Now, who says playing video games can’t lead to productive careers?