No game can last forever, and that’s especially true in the era of live service. In the case of Super Mario Maker, the 2024 shutdown of online services for the Wii U means that you can no longer play the game as it was intended. Sure, you can load Mario Maker up and make your own gauntlets of torture, but you can’t share your creations anymore, which was central to the game’s appeal. You can’t go online and see what kind of platforming levels other people have concocted. And let’s be real, how many of us are itching to pull out a Wii U in the year of our lord 2025?
Mario Maker 2 on the Switch is still alive and kicking, largely kept afloat by a tiny group of diehards who still use the level editor to get their creative juices flowing. It sold better than the first game, which isn’t terribly difficult when one came out on a console flop and the second one was released on what may soon be the most successful console of all time. But arguably, it’s the original Mario Maker that had more meaningful cultural impact.
2015’s Mario Maker was a rare instance where Nintendo felt comfortable enough to hand over its precious brands to the fans, come what may. That’s no small thing coming from a company notorious for pulling down fan games. Sure, there were guardrails. Fans often found themselves making glitch-heavy levels that defied Nintendo’s idea of an acceptable experience. Uploading and playing these forbidden levels became an elaborate game of cat and mouse for fans, with some players often risking bans just to show off a cool level to the community.
Mario Maker also gave the wider world its first taste of the lively Kaizo community, which up to that point had spent years crafting difficult levels using fan-made tools for a niche audience. The concept of ‘impossible’ levels suddenly became mainstream as YouTubers and Twitch streamers spun series around their attempts to reach a flag pole without dying. Without the first Mario Maker, we would never have gotten the viral, nightmare version of 1-1 that became a popular sight in the middle of the pandemic. Incidentally, you can’t play this anymore either. It’s been delisted.
It’s been ten years, and sequel aside, Nintendo’s never attempted anything like Mario Maker again. What came onto the scene as a glimmer of hope for a permissive new era for Nintendo never came to fruition. There’s no Zelda Maker, no Pokémon Maker. And how could there be? Mario Maker was a happy accident; a case of a developer working with an internal tool and wondering if, perhaps, other people might have fun with it too.
It almost wasn’t possible, according to Nintendo. The Japanese publisher is flush with creative talent, but most of it specializes in the creation of 3D games. Finding people who still worked with pixel art and knew how to work with limited palettes was a “challenge” for Mario Maker according to Nintendo. That was ten years ago. This might be a leap, but I’m guessing that there are even fewer people with the skills necessary to bring, say, a 2D Zelda toolkit to life. Nintendo’s propensity for sharing creation tools is still there, as evidenced by Donkey Kong Bananza‘s sculpting mode. But the chances of getting anything that allows players to mess around with sprites specifically seem slim. The prospect of Nintendo allowing fans to do whatever they want with 3D iterations of its major franchises? Call me pessimistic, but that seems like an even bigger stretch.
We may never get anything like Mario Maker again. By that same measure, the server shutdown means that none of us will ever be able to experience Mario Maker the same way again. Mario Maker 2 might hold the mantle now, but the reaper of online video game servers comes for everyone eventually.
