Details behind Super Mario Maker’s “emergency maintenance”
Super Mario Maker’s online functions were taken down for “emergency maintenance” earlier this week. Nintendo didn’t say what was happening, aside from how they would be addressing a bug that occurs in “Create” mode. So what exactly was this all about?
Kotaku has a more in-depth explanation, but below are some excerpts from the site’s report:
“Joseph discovered a video where another player claimed their level had been hacked, as someone else had managed to achieve a world record on a puzzle level in less than three seconds.
Joseph realized the “hacker” had access to items that weren’t in the original level. In Mario Maker, it’s possible to download other people’s levels and edit them, but that’s not what was happening here. The “hacker” was playing the level on the server, which is why their world record times were being recorded.
…if you download it (the level), you can edit it yourself. And if you edit it in a very specific way, players can get some weird things to happen.
What that practically means is Joseph can bring edits into the level when he’s playing online. He’s not actually editing the level server-side, but the game gets confused, and mixes the two stages together.”
This could have caused huge issues for levels. For example, a puzzle course could be completed in a matter of seconds. It would also mean that finishing tough levels would be incredibly simple.
Luckily, this all ended well. Joseph contacted Matt “Jaku” Jakubowski, a streamer who plays Super Mario Maker. Jakubowski actually managed to get in touch with Treehouse senior localization manager Nate Bihldorff via LinkedIn, who said “something similar was on our radar”. However, Jakubowski believes Nintendo wasn’t truly aware of the exploit since Super Mario Maker maintenance usually occurs on Monday, and this emergency maintenance popped up out of nowhere.
