Rumour: Kotaku Claims To Know The Level Editor Exploit Responsible For Super Mario Maker Emergency Maintenance

Kotaku has an interesting theory on the real reason behind Super Mario Maker‘s recent maintenance. It’s claimed to be caused by an exploit glitch in the game that could manipulate gameplay in such a way that the world record runs could be rendered pointless.

In the article, it’s explained that a Super Mario Maker player named Joseph came across this glitch via a YouTube user who had found it and recorded it, he then tested it out for himself by experimenting in the editor to replicate the glitch.

Joseph said: “I saw a couple of tech videos with rails and combined it with swapping items and using the main menu screen to refresh ‘the lock’ on the level created by undoing the rail changes.”

After replicating the glitch, it was found that this exploit worked by playing the level on a server, downloading it, and editing it in the level editor in a specific way. Upon finding out this information, Joseph reached out to another YouTuber, Matt “Jaku” Jakubowski, and asked him to try it out. Jakubowski recorded the results showing both the course played the original way, and also the edited way. He uploaded the clip to YouTube and also reached out to three Nintendo employees via LinkedIn, in hopes that he would get a response to resolve it. He received a reply from Treehouse senior localization manager Nate Bihldorff:

Jakubowski didn’t trust his response and said “It seems that they didn’t actually have this glitch on their radar,” “since typical maintenance is done on Monday for [Mario Maker] and now we have this emergency maintenance.”

Shortly after this communication, Jakubowski’s clip was taken down from YouTube on copyright claims from Nintendo, and after that came the additional maintenance.

Nintendo had advised that the maintenance was due to a glitch, however they did not specify much further. Since Mario Maker is now back online, Nintendo have recently said that “adjustments have been made for a more pleasant gaming experience.”

Both Joseph and Jakubowski have recently tried to replicate the glitch, and have confirmed that this it cannot be reproduced since the patch. Kotaku claims that it appears to be that the extra maintenance put in place was to resolve this exploit.

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