Super Mario Maker

~ the obit ~

The Wii U never got anywhere near my house. It never got near most houses. Nintendo sold about thirteen million of the thing across five years and then quietly moved on, and in Turkey it was the sort of console you had to go looking for rather than trip over in a shop. Super Mario Maker is therefore a game i watched other people play, on video, years after the fact, which turns out to be roughly how a lot of its audience experienced it too.

It came out on 10 September 2015 in Japan and the day after in North America and Europe, timed to the thirtieth anniversary of the first Super Mario Bros. The origin is unglamorous and better for it. Nintendo built the thing internally as a tool for its own level designers, then noticed that the tool was more interesting than most games, and took it to Takashi Tezuka as a product. What shipped was a course editor with the art and physics of the 1985 original alongside New Super Mario Bros. U, plus a rule that decided everything: you could not publish a course until you had beaten it yourself.

That single rule is why the library worked. Every uploaded course was, by definition, possible. It also meant that a course could be published as a proven-clearable object and then never be cleared again by anyone else, which is the small crack the whole later story crawled out of. By May 2016 Nintendo counted 7.2 million courses and over 600 million plays, and the company put out the number that people repeated for years afterward: if you played each one for a minute you would be at it for fourteen years.

The ending arrived on a schedule announced well in advance. The Wii U eShop listing went on 12 January 2021, new uploads stopped on 31 March 2021, and the remaining online services for both the Wii U and 3DS versions were switched off on 8 April 2024. Nintendo gave roughly six months of warning on that last date, announced in October 2023.

i was thirty one when this came out and had no console at all, which is the honest position i am writing from. The part of it i understand without having played a minute is the archive problem, because that is a problem i do recognize. Seven million objects existed only on one company's server, with no export, and everyone involved knew the date they would stop existing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the last 178 ~

In 2017 somebody assembled a spreadsheet of Super Mario Maker courses with a zero percent clear rate, meaning nobody except the uploader had ever finished them, and posted it to reddit. A discord formed around the spreadsheet and called itself Team 0%. For four years it was a slow grind against a target that kept growing, because people kept uploading.

March 2021 changed the shape of it. When Nintendo froze uploads, the number of courses became fixed, and for the first time clearing all of them was a finite job. In February 2023 there were 41,113 left. When the shutdown was announced in October 2023 the count was around 25,000, and a thousand of those fell in the first week. By 5 March 2024 there were 178.

The last one, a course called "The Last Dance", was cleared on 15 March 2024 by a player going by Yamada_SMM2. There was a coda: everybody believed a notoriously brutal course named "Trimming The Herbs" was still standing, and it had been attempted more than 280,000 times, until its own creator admitted a week later that it had been uploaded using tool assistance and did not count. It was cleared legitimately anyway, on 5 April 2024, three days before the servers went off. Tezuka, told about the project by Ars Technica, said it was pretty cool.

~ what got buried with it ~

The game on the disc still works. You can still build a course and hand the pad to somebody sitting next to you. Everything that made it a shared object is gone: the upload portal and the bookmark site, the course IDs people passed around, the clear rates Team 0% had been reading off the server. Seven million levels that were made to be played by strangers are now unreachable by strangers.

The 3DS port from December 2016 is a quieter footnote in the same story. It shipped without the ability to upload at all, which reviewers treated as a missing feature and which now looks like the version that lost less on the day the lights went out. It lost its online services on the same date regardless.

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