Inside the Multi-Year Quest to Finish Every Single Mario Maker Level Before the Servers Close for Good
Did you design your own course in Super Mario Maker and upload it to the Wii U game’s online servers? If so, I’ve got good news for you: Someone has completed it. While posting your personal creations for the rest of the world to try can often feel like a meaningless drop in an endless ocean of user-generated content, a group of passionate Super Mario Maker fans have gone to extreme lengths to ensure that Mario reaches the flagpole in every single level creators like you and me have published. The group is called Team 0%, and right now, they’re just one level away from reaching their goal of dropping the number of incomplete Mario Maker levels down to 0%.
The last level remaining is called Trimming The Herbs, and it’s quickly gaining legendary status as Mario Maker players grind to conquer it before Nintendo shuts down the Wii U servers next month. It seems like it’s just a matter of time, though, as some Mario Maker players like LilKirbs on Twitter have beaten all parts of the level individually and just need to put it all together for that one perfect run. Members of Team 0% expressed confidence to me that a clear is incoming, as some of the best players in the world are learning the required technique as you’re reading this.
Was able to beat the 2nd half of Trimming the Herbs today during practice, the last unbeaten level in the original Mario Maker pic.twitter.com/wCAALKkJX4
— LilKirbs (@LilKirbs14) March 17, 2024
Team 0% and Trimming the Herbs got a lot of attention on social media over the weekend, because the moment Mario reaches the goal, it will mark the end of Team 0%’s mission that started over six years ago. IGN spoke with longtime Team 0% members about the ambitious project, the server shutdown, and what’s next now that Super Mario Maker is nearly wrapped up.
No Mario Left Behind
The origins of Team 0% date back to September 2017, when Mario Maker fan The0dark0one became interested in Super Mario Maker levels that no one had managed to beat.
“When I first started Mario Maker, I used to scour YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit for obscure tricks or glitches,” The0dark0one said in an interview with IGN. “I became interested in levels that had never been cleared before for their potential to contain new and unique tricks that no one had ever seen.”
But when Nintendo’s search tools within Super Mario Maker itself proved to be inadequate for finding truly challenging levels with no completions, The0dark0one used his programming skills to create his own tool that would sweep the Super Mario Maker website for levels with zero clears. That data was then compiled into a spreadsheet and shared on Reddit.
The0dark0one’s initial spreadsheet didn’t get much traction even as he continued to update it each week with newly-published uncleared levels. But that changed when Jeff Maya found the list, inspiring him to create the Team 0% Discord server.
“I got beyond obsessed with [Super Mario Maker] and poured thousands of hours into it,” Maya told IGN. “I stumbled upon a post one day that listed every uncleared level left in the game, and I immediately thought how cool it would be to chip away at that list. I started the server and immediately got a dozen people joining in to help me out.”
What started as a dozen players in late 2017 ballooned into over 3,300 players on the Team 0% leaderboards who have all contributed at least one clear to the overall mission. And there have been a ton of levels for these players to take care of. In the Team 0% Discord server, 11 players are credited with clearing over 1,000 levels each, with a couple players even passing 5,000 clears on their own.
Team 0% told me there were over 10.5 million levels on the servers when Nintendo shut down level uploads in March 2021. Using level ID data, the team estimates the total number of levels uploaded to Super Mario Maker for Wii U was around 68.6 million. Granted, Team 0% themselves haven’t cleared every one of these, as many of the levels were deleted from the servers, while others were completed by Mario Maker fans around the world. There are also exceptions to the 0% rule, like levels that are no longer possible due to previous exploits that Nintendo has patched out. Still, it’s still been an astronomical undertaking for these Koopa crushers as they’ve worked to complete the craziest, most brutally challenging levels in the game. Check out this absolutely wild level below, which was one of the final stages cleared just last week.
team0% その8 pic.twitter.com/apiIXFMjwC
— 天王寺やまだ (@Yamada_SMM2) March 14, 2024
Nintendo Sets a New Deadline
The Super Mario Maker project’s progress was hampered by the release of Super Mario Maker 2 on Nintendo Switch in June 2019. As Team 0% member Black60Dragon told me, “Most of the community moved onto that game, and for quite a while it honestly didn’t seem like this project was ever a possibility.” But that all changed last October when Nintendo announced it would shut down the Wii U and 3DS online servers in April 2024. While most Nintendo fans had long since moved on from that pair of platforms, for Team 0% it meant that it was time to get to work – and fast.
“The motivation behind Team 0% for me is simple: No level deserves to be left behind without a legitimate clear. To say there was an acceleration in activity since the announcement of the server shutdown would be an understatement,” said Fritzef, a Mario Maker player who’s been on Team 0% since 2017. “The activity on [the Mario Maker 1 project] has skyrocketed from just a few dedicated players to hundreds of players clearing as many levels as they possibly can. When the shutdown was announced there were almost 26,000 levels still uncleared… All of these levels were cleared in the last five months.”
You can see for yourself exactly how much Mario Maker level clears have increased in the last several months on Team 0%’s tracking website. In the four weeks leading up to the shutdown announcement, players beat 2,410 levels for the first time. But in the four weeks following the news, the amount of level completions more than tripled with 7,384 clears.
But it hasn’t been easy. Members of Team 0% have shared clips of some of the craziest levels they’ve had to complete over the last several years, and in some cases, I’ve been in complete awe of what I’ve seen. From crazy speedruns, to levels created by complete trolls, to seemingly impossible game exploits like forcing Mario through walls, the amount of dedication required to see some of these levels through is truly admirable. Fritzef’s highlight was beating a level where he had to perform 150 frame perfect wall jumps in a row, which looks like it required an absurd amount of focus and precision to complete.
Wall jump ×150 by @nativefaith0507 – final lap & GG pic.twitter.com/2S4CIlq2Xk
— Fritzef (@OfficialFritzef) January 14, 2024
Team 0% has been wholly up to the challenge, though, as the roster of players includes some of the most skilled Mario veterans in the world.
“Here’s a message from day one on [the Discord] server describing my goal: ‘I’d like to have a group of people who are, combined, good at almost any type of level, and make the 0% list a lot shorter than it is now,’” Maya said. “Never had I imagined we would come this close to doing what’s going on right now. The skillset of the collective of gamers on this team is impressive. We have absolute legends in kaizo, precision, puzzles, trolls, speedruns, anything really!”
In some cases, Team 0%’s immense talent made it harder on themselves, as a handful of their own evil Mario Maker creations came back to bite them – levels that were so difficult that no one else in the world had completed them.
“There are also plenty of levels made by team members that ended up coming here as zero percents,” said Louis, a Team 0% member since 2019. “There are always some people who will say it’s hypocritical, but we’re human too, and a lot of us share the interest in making stuff as hard as possible, or obscure annoying tricks, or even worst level competitions.”
Fortunately, that’s almost all behind them now, as the Super Mario Maker project, more than six years in the making, is one pesky clear away from finally being in the books. It’s an emotional time for the members of Team 0%, as we’re just weeks away from the Wii U online servers shutting down for good on April 8.
“The shutdown of the servers was a bittersweet announcement,” Fritzef said. “It was deeply saddening, but not surprising in the least for me, with the Wii U being the unpopular console it is. It’s cliche but it’s definitely a ‘don’t be sad it’s over, be happy it happened’ moment… The future for the team with Mario Maker 2 will be the same motivation: Beating every level in that game. The quest is not over and we’ll keep the dream alive in the sequel!”
Even though the mission will continue in Super Mario Maker 2, this still marks the end of a meaningful chapter for the Nintendo community. Players from all over the globe have banded together to give a proper sendoff to not only Super Mario Maker, but the Wii U generation as a whole before Nintendo officially pulls the plug in a few weeks. While it will go down in history as an unremarkable footnote in between the roaring successes of Wii and Nintendo Switch, a lot of Nintendo fans hold the Wii U near and dear to their hearts, and Team 0% is giving us one last reason to celebrate Nintendo’s lovable black sheep.
Logan Plant is IGN’s Database Manager, Playlist Editor, and Super Ninfriendo on Nintendo Voice Chat. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.
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