‘I wasn’t sure it was even possible’: the race to finish 80,000 levels of Super Mario Maker

A small team of skilled players set themselves a near-impossible task: to complete every level of Super Mario Maker before Nintendo shut its servers. Did they manage it?

On 14 March, Team 0% was close to finishing its seven-year mission to complete every single uncleared level in the 2015 Nintendo game Super Mario Maker - all 80,000 of them. Two hellish maps stood in their way: Trimming the Herbs and The Last Dance. And time was ticking. Nintendo had announced it was shutting down the game's servers on 8 April, and if the levels weren't completed by then, they would remain forever unfinished. Team 0% would fail at the last stretch of their marathon.

When Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for its Wii U console, it was packed with platforming levels made by its design team. But the game's lasting appeal came from the tools it gave players to make their own levels that they could share online. The only barrier to uploading was that its creator must have completed the level at least once, proving that it was possible.