If you’re still working on your magnum Mario opus for the original Super Mario Maker on Wii U, you might want to wrap things up. Nintendo has announced that Super Mario Maker will be delisted from the Wii U eShop on January 12th, 2021 and the ability to upload courses will be retired shortly after on March 31st. The shutdown extends to the Super Mario Maker Bookmark site which will lose all functionality on March 31st including the ability to update rankings and view bookmarked courses.
Nintendo ominously adds that “depending on the circumstances, these services may be discontinued earlier than mentioned”. To be fair, Nintendo has used this open-ended wording in the past and, as far as I’m aware, never cut off a game or service ahead of their announced deadline.
The good news from all of this? Super Mario Maker is available on disc so the game won’t be totally lost, and it will still be possible to play previously uploaded courses. That’s a lot of Mario. Furthermore, since Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS didn’t allow courses to be uploaded in the first place, nothing is technically being changed about this version. Finally, Nintendo confirmed that these changes will not impact Super Mario Maker 2 for the Switch.
But all of this sure makes me wonder how long it’ll be before their repository of existing courses is shut down forever. A Mario Maker with no user-created levels is clearly not the product that Nintendo sold us on when they originally announced it as “the Mario experience of your dreams”. Time to wake up then, I guess.
Thanks to everyone who submitted the news to the site. I’ve added the deadline dates to the Watch List calendar and will have a page up on the site soon.