n 14 March, Team 0% was close to finishing its seven-year mission to complete every single uncleared level in the 2015 Nintendo gameMaker – 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.
Anyone can create a level in Super Mario Maker, using the Wii U’s touchscreen and stylus to place obstacles and enemies.On Christmas Eve 2017, Jeffie started a Discord server and invited a few friends to try to whittle down the0dark0one’s list. One of the first problems they faced was simply opening the thing; there was so much data that it would crash their browsers.
As Team 0% grew and encountered more of these tricks, they created training levels within Super Mario Maker that taught new players the special techniques they needed to beat challenging levels. “We practice these individual tricks for hours on end until they become second nature,” Black60dragon says.
One player, Fritzef, had the dexterity to tackle the most fiendish levels but struggled to path routes through them, so other players recorded clips of how to navigate each section and stitched them together into a map for him. Even then, it was hard work. “I sacrificed a lot of sleep in the final stretch,” Fritzef says, “but I have no regrets.”
Meanwhile, Trimming the Herbs was uploaded in 2017, and despite more than 200,000 attempts, it had never been beaten. It should take only 17 seconds to complete, but to do it, a player must pull off a string of frame-perfect jumps. It should be possible; its creator even shared a video of how to do it.
“Trimming the Herbs was made to be unreasonably difficult and to cause a ruckus,” Ahoyo, the level’s creator,, revealing they had used a TAS and were admitting to it now because they didn’t want to “deny Team 0% their victory”. And with that, it was done: more than 80,000 levels cleared. Super Mario Maker’s every legitimate challenge had been overcome.