After months of pushing to finish every Super Mario Maker 1 level before 3DS and Wii U servers close forever, the final one has been cleared, though it’s on a technicality instead of skill.
Team 0%, a group of Super Mario Maker 1 and 2 players dedicated to clearing every level in both games, has been working for weeks to complete the final few levels from the first game before servers make it impossible to play. Nintendo announced last year that it would shut down all 3DS and Wii U servers in early April 2024. This spurred Team 0% on to complete every level sooner, but its final win has come more as a wet fart than a bang.
Super Mario Maker 1’s Trimming the Herbs level was cheated
For the last week or so, the only level Team 0% hadn’t managed to complete was Trimming the Herbs. This level is incredibly challenging, and as of yesterday, it was revealed that it was actually somehow cheated. For context, you have to complete any level you make in Super Mario Maker before it can be uploaded because the servers would be flooded with impossible levels and ruin the fun otherwise.
The level’s creator, Ahoyo, owned up to the fact that Trimming the Herbs is an illegitimate level and was still uploaded to the Super Mario Maker 1 servers. There’s a lot of lingo in the thread they’ve used to explain what happened that makes the situation seem more confusing than it is, so I’ll simplify it for you.
Trimming the Herbs was created and uploaded in 2017. Ahoyo planned to raise awareness of it as a super difficult level and then reveal that TAS (tool-assisted speedruns) existed for Super Mario Maker 1. However, not all went as planned, and Trimming the Herbs flew under the radar until this year, when Team 0% popularized it in its effort to complete it before early April.
So why didn’t this cause a huge amount of backlash for Ahoyo? Well, over the past week. It seems to have done just that. I’m not exactly sure why the level wasn’t flagged sooner. Allegedly, it was shown during the competition it was made for, and the TAS exploit was revealed to the judges ahead of their viewing, so it should have been caught then.
Ahoyo has apologized for causing havoc but I don’t think the blame lies entirely with them. Other illegitimate levels have been uploaded to Super Mario Maker and disqualified by Team 0% in its efforts before, so this is nothing new. What it means is that Team 0% completed its mammoth task with its clearance of The Last Dance, and that should be recognized as a huge achievement.
Fans aren’t actually that angry about Trimming the Herbs using tools. The fact that it was uploaded at all is impressive and shows that Nintendo’s system for the game is flawed. I think the best way to look at this is as a complete record of Super Mario Maker 1. A group of players took it upon themselves to explore every legitimate level before the game was lost forever due to its server dependence, and that’s amazing.
Trimming the Herbs is a fun footnote in the archive of levels Team 0% has put together. It’s a positive outcome that goes even further than what this community was aiming to do because it’s uncovered a drama, heist, or mystery that no one actually knew existed. While many of us would obviously rather Nintendo didn’t shut down servers and kill games in this way, that act has brought people together and created a fantastic story intrinsically linked to those servers. In one way, they’ll never truly die because this story can live on forever.
