Trivia / Super Mario Maker

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• AbandonWare: Online services for the game shut down for good in April 2024, bringing an end to playing and sharing courses online.
• Approval of God: Shortly after the game's release, Takashi Tezuka (one of the game's key development members) expressed praise over the creativity of players who uploaded their levels. In particular, he liked the "Don't Touch The Mushroom" levels.
• Ascended Fanon: Super Mario Maker is considered this to Lunar Magic, an unofficial level editor for Super Mario World released at least 15 years before.
• Blooper: When Small Mario turns around while riding Yoshi, a single orange pixel appears between his arm and mustache. Interestingly, the pixel happens to be the same exact shade of orange that's used on a sprite sheet found on The Spriter's Resource, which suggests that the sprites were taken from there.
• Dummied Out:
  • Bizarrely, the game files contain lots of gear and weapons from an early build of the first Splatoon.
  • The initial version of the game included references to unused Mystery Mushroom costumes: Baby Mario, Balloon Fight, E. Gadd, a Golden Retriever, Super Mario Bros. 2 Mario, Mary O the manual guide, Mr. Saturn, a Muncher, Nabbit, the pink rabbit from Nintendo Badge Arcade, Popo, Tetris, and, apparently, the Microsoft Windows logo. These references were removed from v1.01 onward (though some characters' sound effects exist unused). Some of these were later re-added into the game as full fledged Mystery Mushroom costumes, making them no longer unused. While the 3DS version removed the Costume Mario powerup, the only remains are unused costumes of Roy, Ryu, and Rayman.
• Follow the Leader: Mega Man Maker, a fanmade level maker which is to Mega Man as this is to Super Mario Bros.. Just as well, Sonic Studio was made to be its own fanmade equivalent to the aforementioned level makers for the Classic Era of Sonic the Hedgehog.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: The "Peaceful" sound effect (the one with the bird on the branch) previously appeared in WarioWare: Smooth Moves as the sound that plays during the "break time" intermissions after boss microgames.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • Super Mario Maker's release date was two days before the anniversary of the original Super Mario Bros. release in 1985, something which the game itself acknowledges. Also doubles as a Meaningful Release Date.
  • The addition of the Super Mario Bros. Manga Mania version of Mario was to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the manga series, complete with a stage created by the manga's creator.
• No Dub for You: For whatever reason, Shulk's Mystery Mushroom costume speaks Japanese in every region.
• Out of Order: Not all of the additional costumes unlocked through Event Costumes or added to 100 Mario Challenge in the Super Expert update were released as indicated by the official roster order:
  • Sky Pop (#112) was not released until after #113-#118 (Arcade bunny, Master Belch, Mr. Saturn, Captain Toad, Bike, and Birdo).
  • Costumes #133-#144 (Balloon Fighter, Nabbit, Tetra, Donbe, Hikari, Ayumi Tachibana, Baby Mario, Iris Archwell, Mallo, Bubbles, and Diskun) were released before Wolf Link (#132), which was released before #129-#130 (Toadette and Yu Ayasaki). Starfy (#131)'s release was held off until after the others were released.
  • Costumes #152-#153 (Callie and Marie) were released before #150-#151 (Undodog and Dr. Kawashima).
• Ret-Canon: Thanks to Coursebot's official course "Did Somebody Call a Plumber?", the Mario Bros. finding their way to the Mushroom Kingdom via the Brooklyn sewer system (or at least its Metro Kingdom counterpart) is now canon.
• Role Reprise: This game would be the last time Jun Mizusawa reprised her role as Zelda/Sheik from The Legend of Zelda series.
• Throw It In!: The "skinny Mario" came from an incident during programming when the basic Mario sprite was accidentally stretched. The developers were so amused by the result that they decided to make it a feature.
• What Could Have Been:
  • YouTube uploads of level playthroughs were considered, but ultimately dropped in favor of the devs wanting players to share the levels to play rather than only sharing videos to watch. This didn't stop capture card users, though.
  • The announcement trailer showed a more stylized version of the Super Mario Bros. theme, with gradients, a grid in the background even during gameplay, and the ground tiles being embossed. Also, when Mario is under the effects of the Weird Mushroom (then known as the Luigi Mushroom), he just turns into a vertically stretched version of his small sprites, rather than having a unique sprite set. The background of the New Super Mario Bros. U theme had the Acorn Tree that's absent in the final game. Also absent in the final release is the longer time allowed for levels, as the video shows a timer of more than the normal 500 seconds.
  • The game was originally envisioned as a true sequel to Mario Paint where players would use the stylus to draw. It was not long that the developers decided to turn it into a Mario course maker using their experience with Super Mario Bros. level design as inspiration.
  • Originally, the graphics for Lakitu's Cloud in SMB style had an indentation from where his hands were and resembled the original sprite. The SMW styled Bloopers resembled the version seen in SMB3 combined with the graphics of Yoshi's Cookie. In the final release, Lakitu's Cloud is larger to stay consistent with the SMW style and differentiate them from cloud platforms, and the Bloopers are given entirely new graphics to fit the style.
  • The game originally replicated the original physics of the games the themes represent. It was changed to consistently have New Super Mario Bros. U-style physics regardless of theme in an attempt to avoid muscle memory problems (and to make it easier on people who decide to change the game theme in the middle of making a level).
  • The files for the level themes show an early order of how they would be placed, such as Ghost House being placed at the very end.
  • References to five unused Mystery Mushroom costumes exist in the game's code - a golden retriever, a SMB2 Mario (referred to as "MarioUs, based on the game's Japanese title Super Mario USA), a Muncher, "Tetris", and... a Windows logo. Yes, really.
  • Placeholder files refer to both standalone Bullet Bills (in-game, Bullet Bills can only be fired from Bill Blasters) and a sun, which almost certainly refers to the Angry Sun, which does appear in the sequel.
  • Sprites for Mario labeled "hipdrop" and "wall_kick" exist in the game's code for both the SMB3 and SMW styles, which implies that ground-pounds and wall kicks weren't originally exclusive to the NSMBU style. In fact, editing either style's control files to allow ground-pounding will use the sprites when said action is performed! The same isn't true for wall kicks, however.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Due to the presence of glitch levels, Nintendo has since outright deleted them as they violate their policies, despite players praising them. A patch in version 1.45 has since made it almost impossible for new users to perform such glitches. A famous user named Psycrow who had tried to lift the glitch ban has resulted in even more bugfixes.
• Working Title:
  • The game was originally just Mario Maker, with the logo in a similar style to Mario Paint. Later, the "Super" prefix was added, and the logo was made more angular, which gave the game its own identity.
  • The Tagline also changed in development; originally, it was "Create your own custom Mario courses!", which eventually became "Anyone can make it. Everyone can play it."

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