Super Mario Maker Meets its Maker

People sighed and maybe people cried back on Mar. 27, 2023, for that day marked the end of Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS eShops. Any game, DLC, or application owners hadn’t yet grabbed needed to be claimed by 5pm Eastern that day, at least in North America. After that, every last drop of game and content were essentially scrubbed from existence.

Well, a year later, a similar travesty just passed: on April 8, 2024, the Wii U and 3DS on-line service was also snipped, being closed forever for those fans still clinging to their last-gen systems. This meant no more Splatoon as played against a global audience. No more Mario Kart 8 in its original, content-exclusive form.

And, maybe most tragically, no more access to the millions of Super Mario Maker levels wiped without apology.

Now, imagine if a classic like Super Mario World or Super Mario Bros. 3 was suddenly vaporized into oblivion—every copy obliterated, the games’ levels impossible to retrieve and ever play again. It’d be a travesty. A nightmare. Like the Louvre in France forever losing its Mona Lisa to a fire.

Well, that’s Super Mario Maker, except instead of just losing a hundred levels or so, it lost over 10.5 million of them. These player-made stages might still exist in a downloaded state on the random Wii U here or private server there, but for all intents and purposes, these levels no longer exist. Granted, most of them aren’t exactly professional quality, but they’re still the products of untold hours of work and energy. For them to be expunged without sentiment seems wholly wrong, with certain creations exceeding even the Big N’s creativity. In short, some levels are just too phenomenal to be forgotten.

But, per the norm, Nintendo doesn’t care; the levels, no matter how good, are disposable in its eyes. This was evident even before the shutdown where some of the best creations went ignored, never highlighted or properly curated by the company…let alone celebrated. Why couldn’t Nintendo at least preserve and showcase the very best of these stages? Make them available as a free download pack or as a complimentary patch on its website? Why couldn’t Nintendo have released a “play-only” version of Super Mario Maker which simply collected a few hundred, or thousand, of the finest levels? This would have given the home-brew designers some well-deserved recognition, and been a source of easy profit for the company. All it had to be was a disc pressed with a bunch of the already-made levels running on a stripped-down version of the Mario Maker engine. I would have bought it.

But no, the work of those visionary creators has been snuffed without so much as a sniff. The most enterprising and tech-savvy fans can probably scrape this content back from the Internet’s deeper recesses, but for everyone else, this is over eight years of content stricken from the record without remorse. And that’s a horror no one should tolerate. Certainly not the fans.

But they do. Because it’s the Church of Nintendo. And whatever the Big N does is good…or at least easily forgiven.--D

At the time, the ability to create the Mario levels of one's dreams was an irresistible wish. And the possibilities were just about endless.

These specific levels came baked into the game from the start. But once taken on-line, the amount of available stages numbered into the millions.

Super Mario Maker sported several styles/themes, including Super Mario World and graphics taken from the New Super Mario Bros. line of games.

The game's advertisements showed the virtues of the Wii U's touchscreen controller. The beauty of Mario Maker was that it was completely, and intuitively, drag and drop.

Thanks to Longplay Archive for the pics.