Oops!

Super Mario Maker is one of the Wii U's stand-out titles and offers players the chance to create classic Mario levels and share them with the wider world.

The title has drawn comparisons with Minecraft, a game which is constantly supported by content updates and new features. Sadly, Mario Maker has all but been abandoned by its creator, and hasn't had any content updates for quite some time.

Rather that allow the game to fade into the past, game designer and Mario Maker superfan Psycrow decided to keep the title alive by finding exploits and glitches and building levels around them.

Speaking to Kotaku, Psycrow said:

I’d read a comment in a video which essentially stated that if you shake a lava bubble on a track (curving the track), put a mushroom on it, and hit Undo, strange things happen. I did some experiments and I discovered that this was like a backdoor into the game’s inner workings.

As Psycrow uncovered more and more glitches and tricks he wrote about them on his personal site, sharing his knowledge with other players. His levels began to gain traction, racking up plenty of Stars as other players attempted to master them.

You'd think that Nintendo would have been grateful that Psycrow was generating interest in one of its games, but instead it removed the levels in question. Unfazed, Psycrow uploaded them again, only to discover that his account had been banned.

So after Nintendo banned my first account, ThePsycrow, I called and told them how while they’ve been busy NOT adding any new features for a year, I was generating a lot of interest through glitches which basically add features. [I told them that] this game is dying.

Nintendo refused to lift the ban, and the next update for the game seemed to address some of the glitches that Psycrow had discovered. To get around the ban, Psycrow came up with a rather ingenious solution which exploits the fact that Nintendo links user accounts at a hardware level:

You don’t need to buy a new console each time [you get banned] — if you have two consoles you can get around an infinite number of bans using the System Transfer option.

Psycrow has been banned twice to date and has continued to upload his levels. He claims that his desire to break the game all comes down to keeping it alive by discovering new features and then posting about them on his site, YouTube and Twitch.

[Mario Maker] was abandoned prematurely by Nintendo. My levels have actually gotten to #1 in the worldwide rankings for proportional stars in the past, showing how strong the interest has been in glitch levels.

Glitch experiments and pioneering new things is fun to make and fun to play...Nintendo being however they’re going to be about things— that’s their thing, not mine

Do you think Nintendo was right to ban Psycrow's account, given that he's finding things in the game that weren't included by design, or should the company have embraced his creations? Have you played any of Psycrow's levels? Let us know the answers to all of the above by posting a comment below.

[source kotaku.com]