About 80 thousand, so difficult as to seem impossible, and in fact one was
In 2015 it came out on Nintendo Wii U Super Mario Maker, a video game characterized by the possibility of independently creating the game’s levels, using the console’s touchscreen to position the distinctive elements of the Super Mario games, such as blocks, coins, pipes, power-ups and enemies, within the courses. If completed at least once by the creators, the levels could be shared online for other players to try.
Over the years, this freedom of action has allowed the creation of tens of thousands of extremely complex levels, difficult to complete even for very expert players. A few years ago a group of players called “Team Zero Percent” decided to collaborate to try to complete all approximately 80 thousand levels of Super Mario Maker existing.
There are successful last week, in what several technology and pop culture magazines have called a “race against time”: on April 8, in fact, Nintendo will close the server on which it is possible to play Super Mario Maker and consequently, if they had not completed all the levels by that date, they would no longer be able to reach their goal.
Team Zero Percent was founded in 2017, when a Reddit user posted an Excel file listing all the levels of Super Mario Maker with a pass rate of 0 percent, and were therefore completed only by the people who created them. Jeffie, the founder of Team Zero Percent, has told al Guardian that after seeing the sheet he developed a sort of “obsessive mentality” and began to think of a trick to complete all the levels.
In December of that year he decided to open a channel dedicated to this purpose on the Discord messaging platform, widely used by people who are passionate about video games. For a few years, Team Zero Percent’s efforts were essentially useless, as new levels were created every day, making the list potentially endless. Things changed in 2021, when Nintendo suspended uploading to Super Mario Maker and the group had for the first time the opportunity to plan a strategy to complete a finite number of levels, around 80 thousand.
In February 2023, there were still more than 40 thousand levels to complete, but towards the end of the year, also thanks to the announcement of the closure of the server by Nintendo, Team Zero Percent greatly accelerated its activity: at the end of February , a year later, the levels left to overcome were just over three hundred.
In mid-March Kazeihinn, one of the users of the group, had managed to complete the infamous The Last Danceconsidered one of the most difficult levels ever created by a user of Super Mario Maker (on the Guardian journalist and video game expert Julian Benson defined it as “a maze of spikes, ghosts and rotating blades, punishing every misstep”).
At that point only the most difficult of all remained to be completed, Trimming the Herbs, a level created in 2017 and remained unbeaten despite more than 200 thousand attempts, around which enthusiasts had built a sort of mythology in recent years.
Since at that point there was only one level left to beat, all Team Zero Percent users have been playing in recent weeks Trimming the Herbs, but failing every time. Given that Super Mario Maker allows sharing the level only if the person who created it demonstrates having passed it at least once, for a few months the suspicion had been circulating in the group that the author of Trimming the Herbs had fun creating an impossible level and then beating it using a TAS (Tool-assisted speedrun)a software that allows you to recreate the game at reduced speed on an emulator to complete it in the best possible way, allowing you to study the best moves and movements to overcome every obstacle.
It was the truth: last Tuesday Ahoyo, the user who created Trimming the Herbsha admitted that in 2017 he had built an “unreasonably difficult” level to “create a ruckus” using a TAS, and that Team Zero Percent could therefore consider his goal exceeded. Team Zero Percent didn’t take Ahoyo’s revelation very well, as he ruined the moment of celebration.
Louis_XIX, one of the members of the group, said that when they read his words they were “too indignant to be able to celebrate”, and that although it is essentially impossible until April 8th they will try with all their might to complete even Trimming the Herbs.
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