Yes—with one important distinction. Team 0% counted its goal of clearing every legitimate uncleared course in the original Wii U Super Mario Maker complete on March 15, 2024, when Yamada_SMM2 beat The Last Dance. The dramatic apparent final boss, Trimming the Herbs, was later identified by the community as a tool-assisted upload; a player cleared it separately on April 6, two days before Nintendo shut down Wii U online services.
What Team 0% set out to do
In Super Mario Maker, a course is “uncleared” when no player clear has been recorded; the creator’s required completion to upload it does not count as a player clear. That made the game’s online archive a huge community challenge: find courses without a recorded clear and beat them before the archive became inaccessible.
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Team 0% began in 2017 with about 13,000 uncleared courses uploaded in 2015, according to Ars Technica’s 2024 account. The team cleared that initial group in about eight months, then continued through a much larger backlog. Ars reported that, by late 2017, almost 85,000 courses remained uncleared. Those are reported estimates tied to the dates Ars described, not an official Nintendo tally.
The work was not just a contest to beat one famously hard level. The backlog included demanding precision challenges, obscure techniques and glitches, as well as courses whose status could be difficult to classify. Participants described discovering new techniques and glitches along the way. Founder Jeffie told Ars in March 2024, “What if we clear everything?” What began as an ambitious question became a multi-year preservation and skill effort.
#1 Best Overall
- Play a nearly limitless number of side scrolling Super Mario courses anytime, anywhere
- Start with the 100+ built in courses in the single player Story Mode, a new Mario adventure that unleashes the creative potential of Super Mario Maker 2
- Break the rules as you use a wide range of parts, tools, and customization options to create the side scrolling Super Mario courses of your dreams alone or together by passing a Joy Con controller to a partner
- With a Nintendo Switch Online membership, power up the fun even further in Course World as part of the vibrant Super Mario Maker 2 community: share your courses, access a near endless supply made by others, enjoy online multiplayer, and more
- Free software updates to Super Mario Maker 2 have added new features like a World Maker mode letting players create their own world map. Also added are Link from the Legend of Zelda series as a playable character, new course parts, and more
Was Trimming the Herbs really the last course?
Not in Team 0%’s final accounting. Ars Technica’s March 19, 2024 story framed Trimming the Herbs as the apparent final obstacle, with the Wii U shutdown approaching. Jeffie told Ars, “I’d never think we would be this close to actually achieving this goal.” Subsequent reporting changed the ending: the community said Trimming the Herbs had been uploaded with tool assistance, so it did not count as a legitimate uncleared course for the project’s goal.
The legitimate completion
On March 15, 2024, Yamada_SMM2 cleared The Last Dance. Later coverage identified that as the final legitimate course in Team 0%’s completion accounting. This is the milestone that answers whether the team achieved its stated goal: yes.
Rank #2
- Platform: Nintendo Switch
- Genre: Skill
- USK Rating: Approved from 0 years
The extra clear
Player sanyx91smm2 cleared Trimming the Herbs on April 6, 2024. Team 0% celebrated it as an additional achievement, not as the course that completed the legitimate goal. The original story’s cliffhanger therefore has a resolved ending, but its apparent final boss and the project’s actual final legitimate course were not the same thing.
Was Trimming the Herbs the hardest level?
It was an exceptionally demanding course and the focus of the final-days drama, but the available reporting does not establish it as definitively the hardest. Difficulty is subjective, and a course’s popularity affects how many plays and attempts it can accumulate. The project’s scale and variety—not a single universally ranked level—are central to what Team 0% accomplished.
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- Save the Flower Kingdom from Bowser, Bowser Jr., and the Koopalings in the latest side-scrolling Super MarioTM adventure
- Choose from the largest cast of characters in a side-scrolling Mario game, including Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Rosalina, and other favorites
- Ease into the action with Assist Mode—your character can recover from falls and won’t take damage
- Use power-ups like the Super Flower Pot to transform into a flower and throw flowers, or the Elephant Fruit to spray water and trounce foes with your trunk
- Unlock and equip badges with various effects like swimming faster, recovering from falls, or getting extra air time
What happened to Wii U Super Mario Maker online?
Nintendo’s support pages give two key dates. Course uploads for Wii U Super Mario Maker and the Bookmark website ended on March 31, 2021. Wii U online play and other functions that use online communication ended on April 8, 2024. The latter shutdown came two days after Trimming the Herbs was cleared.
- You can no longer upload courses or download courses through the Wii U service.
- You can no longer use the Bookmark website.
- Courses downloaded before the shutdown can still be played offline.
- Super Mario Maker 2 on Nintendo Switch was not affected by this Wii U service change.
That offline exception matters: the online archive is no longer available for finding and downloading courses, but a course already saved on a Wii U remains playable. Nintendo’s official Super Mario Maker for Wii U Discontinuations FAQ explains the course and Bookmark changes; its online-services announcement confirms the April 8 shutdown.
Quick Recap
Sources
- Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, March 19, 2024, on Team 0%, the backlog and the original Trimming the Herbs cliffhanger.
- Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, March 26, 2024, on the tool-assisted upload and the project’s legitimate completion.
- Liam Doolan, Nintendo Life, April 6, 2024, on the later clear of Trimming the Herbs.
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