Super Mario Maker players rush to complete the world’s most fiendish Mario stages before server shutdown 

On October 4 2023, Nintendo announced that they will be shutting down the online servers for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U on April 9 2024 at 9am (JST). This move will make the platforms’ online- only games unplayable, and this includes 2015’s Super Mario Maker. A community of players is racing against time to beat all the stages before the service shuts down, as reported by GamesRadar+. Now they’ve only got one month left. 

Super Mario Maker is a 2D platform game released on the Wii U in 2015, with a Nintendo 3DS version coming out the following year. The game allows players to make their own levels featuring Nintendo’s famous plumber mascot and publish their creations on the internet for people all over the world to play. The Wii U version of the popular title sold over 4.02m copies and was praised for its approachable interface and course editing tools. A sequel, Super Mario Maker 2 was released on Nintendo Switch in 2019. 

The first game was discontinued by Nintendo back in March 2021, a move that prevented new stages from being uploaded on the internet. However, it is still possible to play all the old levels that players have uploaded over the years, at least until April 9, 2024.  

However, many of these user-created levels are exceedingly difficult, with some so fiendish that they have only been beaten by their original creators. Rising to the formidable challenge, a group of players formed Team 0% last year and set up a website called “Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet?” Their goal is to clear all the user-created stages of the game. At the time of the site’s creation in February 2023, there were 41,113 stages yet to be completed. However, a year later and the team has reportedly completed 99.74% of their goal, impressively conquering over 40,000 stages in this time. No doubt the announcement about the servers being shut down has spurred them on. At the time of writing, they now have a month left to complete the remaining 124 stages. 

Various statistics on the cleared stages can be viewed on the site. The leaderboard gives an overview of the number of stages completed by the top performing team members. The highest ranked player has cleared an impressive 4736 stages at the time of writing. 

In Super Mario Maker, players could choose to create stages in the style of Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World. However, the category with by far the highest percentage of stages still left to be cleared is the New Super Mario Bros. U style. This is probably because this style contained a larger array of elements that could be used to create extremely difficult stages, including more transformable items and moves such as the wall-kick and the spinning jump.  

The site’s list of stages yet to be cleared is packed with extremely difficult level layouts in which the slightest error can send Mario to his death. On top of this, items must be acquired and used appropriately in the right place. Team 0% is home to some very skilled Mario players, including speedrunners. In other words, the remaining stages have no margin for error and are challenging for even the most hardcore players. The video below of user-created level “Trimming the herbs” is an example of a short but devious stage packed with hazards, which at the time of writing, Team 0% has yet to clear. 

User-made stages in Super Mario Maker must have been cleared at least once by their creator for them to be uploaded to the internet. This means that even if Team 0% hasn’t completed it yet, each stage on their to-do list has been cleared at least once. Interestingly, 121 of the yet to be cleared stages were made by players in Japan. 

On average, Team 0% has been clearing dozens of stages each day over the past year. However, the clear rate has been falling recently, probably due to the extreme difficulty of the remaining stages. With only a month to go until the servers shut down, it remains to be seen whether Team 0% can complete their grueling challenge. If you think you have what it takes, why not try to beat the remaining stages yourself? 

Written by. Verity Townsend based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2024-03-06 13:09 JST)