Nintendo Keeps Banning These ‘Mario Maker’ Levels, But the Creators Just Publish Them Again

When a group of Super Mario Maker 2 designers called The Banned Wagon announced it was publishing a group of levels purposely pushing against conventional Mario level design, they knew Nintendo, a company that’s historically removed levels from its Mario Maker games without explanation, would come knocking. They knew the levels would get banned. 

For almost three days—an eternity, really—the levels survived Nintendo’s strict moderation, until finally they didn’t, and Nintendo kicked them off, classifying the levels, as the company often does, as having “a bug.”

But those (almost) three days were important, because once a player downloads the levels to a Switch, Nintendo cannot take them away. Nintendo does not remove levels locally.

“It seems that our plan of working around Japanese office hours paid off,” said Marble King, one of the organizers behind The Banned Wagon, to Waypoint recently.

Nintendo is sensitive about levels featured in The Banned Wagon’s collection because they’re what the community calls “troll” levels, which frequently utilize advanced techniques that aren’t tutorialized by Nintendo and feature extensive creative misdirection. Since the original Super Mario Maker, Nintendo has frequently deleted such stages without explanation. 

But the creators had a backup plan, which also worked—for a little while. After Nintendo removed the levels, the team would upload a backup set of identical levels, share the download codes with the Mario Maker community, and then manually delete the levels.

“The way Nintendo has set up their moderation systems,” said Marble King, “they only hand out repercussions if their own mechanisms cause content to be removed. If a user uploads content and then removes it themselves, nothing happens. Or so we thought.”

It’s unclear to Marble King and others what went wrong, but eventually, Nintendo caught on, and not only did the levels for The Banned Wagon disappear, but Nintendo issued a month-long ban for everyone who contributed a level to The Banned Wagon Project. Their online access will lift in a month, but the assumption is the next time will prove permanent.

But again, The Banned Wagon figured this might happen. There are multiple redundancy plans in place, including having all of the levels available on another Switch attached to a completely different account that Nintendo’s unaware of. But a few days ago, even that account was caught by Nintendo, forcing the levels to head back underground again.

For the moment, the cat-and-mouse chase continues. Eventually, it’ll probably end in Nintendo’s favor, but for historical purposes, The Banned Wagon team has published an open source version of their levels for people willing to dance in the murky pool of emulation.

“There are only two guarantees in this universe,” wrote one fan of The Banned Wagon on Twitter recently, “the first being that everyone will die eventually and the second one being that Nintendo will PermaBan this whole operation eventually.”

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