Since Super Mario Maker launched on Sept. 11, more than one million user-created courses have been uploaded, according to Nintendo of Japan.
Nintendo’s online features always seem to lag behind those of their competitors. This game itself represents a huge improvement in that arena. The company has been putting a lot more work into MiiVerse, it’s in-game social network for Wii U and 3DS, but it still feels walled off — self-contained and not very user friendly. Still, you can find a lot of Super Mario Maker content in MiiVerse at its website.
With a 16-character Course ID number, sharing your level creations with real-life friends and getting the word out to your non-MiiVerse followers still can be cumbersome. So, it comes as no surprise that fans are creating tools to make it easier. Nintendo Life — an online magazine that isn’t affiliated with Nintendo, despite the name — is just one example of a website with such a tool.
Of course, many gaming news and fan sites are starting to curate cool courses — Kotaku’s doing a good job, for example.
Diehard fans of Nintendo properties, not content simply to defend the company’s digital weak points, often jump in and build useful online tools that help the communities they love. Tangent alert: For Splatoon, I recently discovered Splatoon.ink to count down to the next map rotation and the more detailed and visually dynamic Splatooniverse.)
If you know of other Super Mario Maker sharing tools, or have made a course you want to share, let us know in the comments. My own humble efforts so far: “Won-Won,” a riff on the classic World 1-1 with the Course ID 265F-0000-0024-0861; and “Castle d’Hassle,” aka EB2F-0000-0059-7583. Be gentle, for while I think they’re two in a million and used to design my own SMB courses on graph paper in elementary school, this is the first time I’ve ever been able to make actual playable courses.
UPDATE 10/27/2015: Make that 3.2 million levels uploaded. Mamma mia!
