UPDATE: Ahoyoo has confirmed that Trimming the Herbs was uploaded with TAS tools, meaning that The Last Dance was the final legitimate level all along! Congrats to kazeihinn on the Last First Clear! The journey continues in Super Mario Maker 2…
ORIGINAL POST:
Team 0% is attempting to clear every level in Super Mario Maker before the servers shut down on April 8. (New level uploads have been disabled since 2021, so there is no danger of new levels appearing at the last minute.) As of a few days ago, only a single level remains: Trimming the Herbs, uploaded in 2017 by Ahoyoo. (See also Ahoyoo’s original upload video.)
The level is short but extremely precise, requiring Mario to use Bob-ombs to precisely remove Piranha Plants and collect coins while navigating a tight space filled with spikes. There have been over 200,000 attempts so far! If you have a Wii U and feel like you might be a Mario master, this is your opportunity to pick up the final First Clear in Super Mario Maker history.
Ahoyoo was known to be a good player, particularly with bombs (his other level, bombs5, is the same kind of tricks).
In 2017, there was no emulator capable of running SMM1 properly, and there was no controller for it to TAS with. So in order to TAS the level, he would have had to build an Arduino, learn to code, detect somehow when the level starts, send inputs to the USB port, enter the right inputs, and try and work out timings which are actually very difficult even in old systems, and very time consuming.
The best players currently are making progress on the level with around 20 hours of practice. Ahoyoo likely had hundreds of hours on this level alone (as the creator even, just to make the level), and it’s said he spent thousands of hours playing the game obsessively. Spending more time to TAS would have been counter productive. If not impossible without an emulator (for reasons that are very technical TAS’ing a modern system is close to impossible without a camera and some AI).
Now there is a theory that he could have cheated the video (with editing) and cheated the submission process, but the cheats for submission were not widely known at the time (2017) and Ahoyoo wasn’t known as an editor. So he would have needed help etc etc. That leave traces on forums that people likely would have found by now.
Being a good player and obsessed at the game as he was, it’s more likely that he beat it fair and square, the way people are getting closer every day to beat it. So with all the evidence we know that accusation doesn’t hold.
Edit: well that didn’t age well. I guess he DID have early access to TAS tools.
May not have aged well, but it was still an interesting read thanks
in 2017, the Wii U was an already open book for homebrewers IIRC, that’s why I asked why considering TAS was almost no-go at the time.
thanks for thr write up though!