In 2015, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for the Wii U, a game that allowed players to make and share their own 2D Mario levels. In 2021, the company ended the ability to upload courses, the game having been eclipsed by its sequel on the Switch. But in January 2024, Nintendo announced an end to all online services for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS games on April 8th. For Super Mario Maker, that meant the millions of player-made levels would be unceremoniously shuttered.

Or at least, it would have been unceremonious, if it weren’t for a group called Team 0%. The group had been trying to beat every uncleared level in the game for years, which was made easier once they had a fixed target in 2021. When the announcement came that the Wii U’s online services were being shut down, there were approximately 26,000 levels made by hand in Super Mario Maker that hadn’t ever been beaten. The team mobilized to try to make that zero within the four months that they had.

“I was pretty disappointed when the announcement hit,” says group member LouMarru. “Several people felt it was on the horizon, I just wish I had more time with the game.” That sense of disappointment — but not shock — is shared among all the members of Team 0% that I spoke to. “It seems that all online communities have the same life cycle,” says The0dark0one, who made the first list of uncompleted levels back in 2017.

The shuttering of company-hosted servers is one way games are constantly being erased. A large chunk of Super Mario Maker is officially unplayable nine years after its release. Go back more than 15 years, and only 13 percent of games are accessible outside of an archive, piracy, or getting your hands on legacy equipment.

“Super Mario Maker is my favorite game and I have so many memories of playing [it], so to think about all of these levels being deleted for good is pretty sad,” says Black60Dragon, one of Team 0%’s founding members. “A lot of people, myself included, have been trying to make as many alternate accounts on their Wii Us as possible to download their favorite levels before they’re gone for good.”

But with a deadline, there was one more thing to do. “My reaction [to the announcement of the shutdown] was just to put out the call for help for 0%,” says group member Louis_XIX. And plenty of people responded. “It brought back hoards of people,” says LouMarru. The majority of these players weren’t skilled enough to beat the most intense levels, but they provided the numbers necessary to get through the bulk of the easier ones. And it also motivated the highest-level players, some of whom had drifted away, like Jeffie, who made the Team 0% Discord server back in 2017. “I decided to come back for one final grind,” he says.

“This felt like the best possible way to send off a game that has meant so much to so many of us,” says Black60Dragon. “I know what it was like to spend a lot of effort in making a level I really liked, only for nobody to play it. So making sure every single level gets at least one clear is a very satisfying thing to do.”

That journey was something of a rollercoaster. The remaining levels were examples of “Kaizo Mario,” a design philosophy that can be roughly summarized as “very, very difficult.” On screens cluttered with death traps, players must move, jump, and interact with extreme precision — often using consecutive frame-perfect tricks or inputs that must be done within the right fraction of a second. But by mid-March, there were only two levels remaining: “The Last Dance” and “Trimming the Herbs.”

When “The Last Dance” was beaten on March 15th, for a while, Team 0% and the watching world thought that they had their final boss, “Trimming the Herbs,” which required 18 perfect jumps in a row. Super Mario Maker users had to have beaten their own levels to upload them, meaning it should have been humanly possible. But on March 26th, the creator of the level admitted that it had been made using illegitimate assistance. “Trimming the Herbs” was no longer a part of the list. Super Mario Maker had been 100 percent completed. (On April 6th, two days before the servers went down, a player called sanyx91smm2 went ahead and beat it anyway.)

Completing Super Mario Maker probably would have happened regardless of whether the servers shut down or not. “The simplest reason is a completionist urge,” says Louis_XIX. But in the dramatic story of the road to completion, it’s clear that the announcement of the servers’ closure had a somewhat paradoxical effect. Although disappointed that it was happening, the group was massively galvanized to achieve their goal before it was no longer officially possible.

“To say that it would have been less exciting [if the servers had never shut down] is an understatement,” says Black60Dragon. “We probably would have still done it, eventually, but it was just a small group of people chipping away at the mountain of levels. […] With the announcement of the deadline, it lit a fire under everybody to make it happen.” 

Team 0% is now focusing on pulling off the same goal for Super Mario Maker 2, the still-active Switch successor. For now, it’s a fun way to keep up the momentum generated by the SSM1 shutdown — they’ve so far completed every level made in 2019 and are making progress on the courses from 2020. 

But eventually, it’s likely to become the same sort of timed challenge. The online servers will only last as long as Nintendo leaves them open, and all of the levels in Super Mario Maker 2 will one day officially disappear as well. The members of Team 0% know this well. “To me, the shutdown announcement was inevitable, and only a matter of time,” says Louis_XIX. “I’m just glad we were able to finish everything.”