Super Mario Maker’s “final boss” was a fraud all along

The Super Mario Maker community and "Team 0%" have declared victory in their years-long effort to clear every user-submitted level in the original Wii U game before the servers shut off for good on April 8. That victory declaration comes despite the fact that no human player has yet to clear "Trimming the Herbs" (TTH), the ultra-hard level that gained notoriety this month as what was thought to be the final "uncleared" level in the game.

This strange confluence of events is the result of an admission by Ahoyo, the creator of Trimming the Herbs, who came clean Friday evening regarding his use of automated, tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) methods in creating the level. That means he was able to use superhuman capabilities like slow-motion, rewinding, and frame advance to pre-record the precise set of perfectly timed inputs needed to craft the "creator clear" that was necessary to upload the level in the first place.

"I’m sorry for the drama [my level] caused within the community, and I regret the ordeal," Ahoyo wrote on the Team 0% Discord and social media. "But at least it was interesting. However in the end the truth matters most. Congratulations to Team 0% for their well-earned achievement!"

While Team 0% members expressed relief at finally reaching the end of their quest, there was also a sense of deflation among the team over the way their final achievement played out. "We accomplished the goal we've had for over six years, but it almost doesn't feel exciting to me," Team 0% administrator Black60Dragon told Ars Technica. "Instead it's just clouded with drama. So it's bittersweet."

Years of hidden fraud

The TAS-based fraud behind Trimming the Herbs' creation dates back to August 2017, when creator Ahoyo started a level design contest called PogChamp (named after the now-removed but then-popular Twitch emote). The contest was designed "to see who could make the coolest Mario Maker tricks," Ahoyo said in the contest's intro video. Ahoyo added that the contest was "anything goes" and that creators would need to "try to push the limits" of the game, two statements that seem a bit ironic now that the truth about TTH's TAS-based creation has come to light.

Later that month, Ahoyo was also one of the judges during the PogChamp contest finals, where level submissions were evaluated on a Twitch livesteam in the categories of flow, uniqueness, and difficulty. Trimming the Herbs was the only level showcased in the "difficulty" category, with judges calling the level "stupid hard" and noting that it required "an insane level of precision" to complete so many frame-perfect bomb throws and catches in a row.

Only after a few minutes of this collective gawking among the judges did Ahoyo admit under questioning, "I did make this level. I apologize. I entered my own contest." And after some slight discussion of whether or not the community would accept a judge entering his own contest, Ahoyo gladly accepted disqualification on a separate technicality: The level takes 12 seconds to complete despite the rules restricting submissions to a maximum of 10 seconds.

Nowhere during the livestreamed level viewing does Ahoyo admit that Trimming the Herbs was created with automated tools, even though it would have been the perfect opportunity to reveal that particular bit of trolling.

In his admission of Friday, Ahoyo said that Trimming the Herbs "was made to be unreasonably difficult and to cause a ruckus" and that his original intent was to "announce TAS existed for SMM" after the level had been "played, dissected, and scrutinized." When no one noticed the true nature of his clear video, though, Ahoyo writes that "the sunk cost fallacy of wanting to follow through with the failed troll, combined with new [real-life] responsibilities, allowed the nonsense to continue." Ahoyo added that he "did not expect that it would go unnoticed or perceived as easy from watching the video or that it would take nearly seven years to be uncovered."

Ahoyo's TAS-based deception continued well past the inertia of TTH's secret creation, though. In 2021, just before Nintendo halted uploads for new Super Mario Maker levels, Ahoyo uploaded bombs5, another level requiring incredible levels of technical precision in bob-omb bouncing. Ahoyo now admits that level "is also illegitimate" and that he "deserve[s] no credit for either and will not deny Team 0% their victory." (He also gestures toward "tendon issues in my thumb" as a potential reason that it "became unrealistic to continue" with Super Mario Maker after making bombs5).

A secret TAS method?

Ahoyo's admission was made all the more shocking because, as far as the Super Mario Maker community knew, there weren't any plausible ways to create tool-assisted speedruns on the Wii U in 2017. Even today, automating Wii U games remains difficult, thanks to difficulties in mimicking the system's wireless inputs and getting frame-perfect emulation of the system itself.

"There are effectively two distinct challenges," tool-assisted speedrun expert and TASBot keeper Allan "DwangoAC" Cecil told Ars. "1) How do you create a TAS for Super Mario Maker? 2) How do you play back a TAS of a Super Mario Maker level on a real Wii U such that a clear video and upload could be made?"

Ahoyo hasn't detailed the specific method he used to automate the inputs needed to complete TTH, only saying publicly that "someone had messaged me about a TAS they were working on for the Wii U" before "abandoning the project." Ahoyo says this method "was replicated by my friend after two days of building. Because I had already resigned to leave streaming and pursue other things, and suddenly had a working TAS, I thought that the bomb guy [i.e., Ahoyo himself] should go out with a bang, so TTH was constructed."

Speaking to Ars, Black60Dragon said that Ahoyo recently told him that "[Ahoyo] doesn't have much to contribute" regarding additional details "because his friend built the TAS for him."

While there were some public suspicions about whether Ahoyo's original upload was the result of a TAS, the general consensus up until Friday was that the upload was legit. As one popular TTH FAQ noted last week, "at the time of TTH's upload the only known tool for TAS'ing a Mario Maker level would be to play back inputs via a computer macro on the Wii U emulator Cemu. This was incredibly inconsistent at the time, and seems to still be to this day."

Cecil doubts the Cemu theory and instead suspects that Ahoyo's TAS "was developed with very crude methods, such as hardcoded inputs sent over Bluetooth. We've ascertained there is no wired method that can easily be used on an unmodified Wii U, but there is the possibility that Ahoyo was using a hacked console, which may have allowed USB support at the time."

In any case, Cecil said, "this was very clearly not something general purpose, and the TAS was designed around the level at the same time that the level was designed around the capabilities of the TAS." In the meantime, Cecil said he's "deep in the research phase to determine how viable it will be to both recreate the Trimming the Herbs TAS and separately play it back on an official, unmodified Wii U," ideally before the April 8 server shutdown.

Regardless of the technical methods involved, the fact that Ahoyo passed off an automated run as a human achievement goes against a central tenet of the TAS community. "There are a lot of folks who are pretty sensitive about any kind of TAS activity," Cecil told Ars. "The issue is just as concerning for me. I never want to see anyone pass off TAS effort as human effort under any circumstances. In my role as part of the senior staff of TASVideos I can say with authority that we go to great lengths to ensure we have proper labeling to prevent [this kind of] damage."

Not impossible, but close enough

Even without TAS tools, it is sometimes possible for Super Mario Maker makers to complete and upload levels that are technically impossible for anyone else to clear. That's because level creators will often upload levels that make use of unintended glitches in the behavior of certain in-game objects.

If and when Nintendo patches those glitches, those levels become literally impossible to complete going forward. And while Nintendo does its best to remove those glitch-abusing levels when it notices them, Team 0% has also spent a good deal of effort identifying and labeling extant "actually impossible" levels, removing them from their "uncleared level" denominator and saving the community a lot of wasted completion attempts.

Humans have completed every part of [Trimming the Herbs] individually. The challenge is doing each part simultaneously.

Team 0% moderator Louis_XIX

Unfortunately for Team 0%, Trimming the Herbs doesn't fit cleanly into this "actually impossible" bucket. On the contrary, "TTH is definitely humanly possible," as Team 0% moderator Louis_XIX told Ars. "Humans have completed every part of it individually. The challenge is doing each part [one after another]," moderator The0dark0one added.

Possible or not, the fact that TTH's own creator wasn't able to clear the level without machine assistance meant Team 0% wasn't comfortable asking a member of the public to clear it for their quest. "TTH is basically as impossible as humans beating the TAS world record for Super Mario Bros., so it’s a different story," Team 0% founder Jeffie told Ars.

Moving on

Ahoyo's years of unnoticed trolling have heavily deadened the impact of what should have been a triumphant moment in the long history of Team 0%. "I wish he came forward sooner," Team 0% founder Jeffie told Ars. "[TTH] is a cool showcase level, but it never should’ve been 'the last uncleared level.'"

"I feel like it was the worst possible outcome," The0dark0one told Ars. "If 'The Last Dance' [which was cleared for the first time on March 15] had been recognized as the last level, that would have been poetic to say the least. If someone had cleared TTH on stream, it would have been hype. We got neither."

An international celebration on the "Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet?" web tracker.

Credit: Team 0%

Black60Dragon lamented "the fact that we beat Super Mario Maker a week ago and didn't get to celebrate [is] really disheartening. Everybody was extremely hyped waiting for the clear of the final level, and suddenly all the steam was pulled out."

Still, there was a sense of gratitude that the truth finally emerged. "I'm thankful Ahoyo stepped forward," Cecil said. "I know it was a trap that was hard to get out of and it took a lot of courage to do that."

And despite their collective annoyance over an anticlimactic ending, Team 0% asked in its Discord that its followers "not... harass Ahoyo or anyone else over this and not cause any unnecessary drama" and to "keep the discourse healthy and rational" around the events.

Everybody was extremely hyped waiting for the clear of the final level, and suddenly all the steam was pulled out.

Team 0% moderator Black60Dragon

That annoyance also hasn't eliminated Team 0%'s collective pride in achieving a small bit of gaming history. "I’m mostly glad we achieved our goal, without any so-called 'wall' whatsoever," Jeffie said. "Ever since I started this team, every damn day had at least one clear. From start, right till the very, very end! I can only smile when thinking of it this way."

For now, Team 0%'s focus has turned to the even larger mountain of uncleared levels facing Super Mario Maker 2 players on the Switch. Currently, the team is focused on trying to clear about 93,000 Super Mario Maker 2 levels uploaded in 2020 (out of 228,000 that were uncleared in February of 2022) and about 88,000 uncleared levels uploaded in 2022 (out of about 196,000 originally identified). Those clears are a bit more difficult in Super Mario Maker 2 than its predecessor, because the Switch game doesn't allow players to download levels for segmented offline practice.

"Right now we're still in the early phase of going through tons of easy/bad levels, before things get more exciting toward the end again," Team 0%'s Louis_XIX told Ars. "We'll see how many people stick around, and what kinds of levels remain at the end of each year."

As for Trimming the Herbs, the newly revealed fact that it was created with TAS methods hasn't halted the effort to log the first verified human clear of the level. After all, Ahoyo's other TAS-assisted level upload, bombs5, was cleared in 2022 by a human who didn't even know about its TAS-fueled origins.

Super Mario Maker streamers, including JankPickle, Sanyx, and Thabeast, have committed to keep up the grind until Trimming the Herbs goes down or the servers shut for good. As Thabeast noted in the title of a recent hours-long stream, "We must beat this level at all costs!!!"