One fan has spent seven years building a proper Super Mario Bros. 5 within Mario Maker, and the incredible results of that work are now available for everyone to play.
If you just want to dive straight into creator Metroid Mike 64's take on Super Mario Bros. 5, you can hop into Super Mario Maker 2, input maker ID 0G9-XN4-FNF and get straight to it. This is a full Super World with 40 courses spread across eight worlds, all built to have a classic Nintendo feel with minimal gimmicks or gotchas.
"The gameplay is all classic Mario," Metroid Mike 64 says. "I’m not trying to troll you or purposely try to kill you, I’m trying to provide you with something Nintendo should’ve done already, make a full Mario game within Super Mario Maker 2 that’s fun as heck!"
After playing through the first few stages, I'm already impressed. This is quintessential level design in the style of the best Mario games, expanding the classic types of levels with many of the new features that Mario Maker brings to the mix. And I'm just in the first world - later stages promise some absolutely wild expansions of the formula.
The gameplay is all classic Mario. I’m not trying to troll you or purposely try to kill you, I’m trying to provide you with something Nintendo should’ve done already, make a full Mario game within Super Mario Maker 2, that’s fun as heck! pic.twitter.com/EXCiPtvsPpSeptember 25, 2022
As Metroid Mike 64 explains on Twitter, work on Super Mario Bros. 5 began with the original Super Mario Maker in 2015. That means, yes, at some point a bunch of courses had to be transferred into Super Mario Maker 2 - something that you cannot do automatically. "I didn’t want those SMM1 courses to go to waste so I painstakingly imported them block-for-block from my Wii U to my Switch," Metroid Mike 64 says.
Of course, it wasn't actually possible to create a full game in Mario Maker until Super Worlds arrived in a 2020 update for Super Mario Maker 2, allowing creators to build proper world maps linking levels together, just as they'd appear in a real Mario game. The launch of World Maker is when Metroid Mike 64 "my dream became a reality."
Super Mario Bros. 5 is already proving pretty popular. Its announcement tweet went viral with thousands of retweets, and it's already getting prominent playthroughs from big YouTube channels like GameXplain. If you want to enjoy the release vicariously, you can check out that video above.
Oh, and if you're as knee-jerk upset as I was at the perceived slight to Yoshi's Island, Metroid Mike 64 is still debating whether '5' is the proper title for this creation, too. We can probably forgive the confusion over whether Yoshi's Island is a 'real' Mario game (it is) in light of the quality of this work.
For more of the best Super Mario Maker 2 levels, you can follow that link.
