Super Mario Maker Bookmark

» see supermariomakerbookmark.nintendo.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Super Mario Maker shipped in September 2015 and immediately had a discovery problem. Players were making courses faster than anyone could find them, and the only way to reach a specific one was a sixteen-character course ID typed in by hand off a forum post or a tweet. The game's own browsing tools ran on a television, through a Wii U GamePad, which is a bad place to search a library of millions.

So on 22 December 2015 Nintendo put the library on the web. Super Mario Maker Bookmark was a normal website: it opened in any browser, and once you signed in with a Nintendo Network ID you could bookmark whatever you found. The bookmark then appeared inside the game on your console, which meant the hard part of discovery happened on a device that had a keyboard.

It had three tabs of browsing and one of them mattered. Recommended Courses sorted the catalog by difficulty, from Easy up to Super Expert, and under it sat Special Collections: courses featured at events like GameCenter CX and Tokaigi, plus themed sets picked by the people who made the game. Until Miiverse was switched off in 2017, every course on the site also carried a link straight to its Miiverse comment thread, so the website was a front door to the game's conversation as well as its content.

~ the dossier ~

~ the browser half of a console game ~

The thing worth noticing about Bookmark is that Nintendo built it at all. This is a company whose online services have historically stopped at the edge of the console, and here it was running a public web property whose entire job was to make the console experience work. By May 2016 the game had 7.2 million courses in it, played more than 600 million times, and a meaningful share of that traffic was routed by a website that was not on any box.

In 2015 I was an engineer in Ankara with a PC and a phone. The Wii U was the console almost nobody around me owned, and the numbers back that up: it sold 13.56 million units in its entire life, against more than a hundred million for the Wii before it. Mario Maker was the best thing on it and most people met the game through other people's YouTube footage rather than a GamePad.

~ the five missing days ~

Nintendo announced the shutdown on 25 November 2020. Course uploading and the Bookmark site would both end on 31 March 2021 at 00:00 UTC. The game left the eShop that January. Four months of warning is generous by Nintendo's standards, and it was enough time for Archive Team to organize a grab of the site.

The grab started and the site died at roughly 01:50 UTC on 26 March, five days before the published deadline. It came back around 05:35 on the 29th for a few hours and then returned nothing but error pages. Nobody has explained the early exit, and the most likely answer is dull: somebody turned off a dependency ahead of schedule, because the date on the support page was written for players and the servers kept their own calendar.

~ still playable ~

The courses themselves did not die that day. Nintendo kept download and play working for everything already uploaded, and that part survived until 8 April 2024, when online functionality ended across all Wii U software. What ended in March 2021 was the ability to add anything new, and the ability to look at the whole collection from outside the machine.

So the thing that broke first was the index, not the archive. For three more years there were millions of playable courses sitting on Nintendo's servers with no working way to search them from a browser, which is close to the condition of a library after someone burns the card catalog.

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