Decades later, the classic Super Mario Bros. games still have more secrets to be uncovered. Most console gamers of a certain age will remember the Minus World glitch, but that's not the only secret level hidden in the old games – in fact, there are a pile of additional, glitched levels in Super Mario All-Stars that have only just been discovered by a band of speedrunners and glitch hunters.
The Minus World is a glitched level you can access in the original NES version of Super Mario Bros. by essentially phasing through a wall in level 1-2 and entering the hidden warp pipe at the end of the stage before it fully scrolls in. Different versions of the game each have their own Minus Worlds, with different variants on the glitched level appearing in the Famicom Disc System and arcade Vs. versions.
With that background in mind, you might think that since Super Mario Bros. 2 – the Japanese version, often known as The Lost Levels when it's been released for English-speaking gamers – is very similar to the original game, it might have its own Minus World. But while you can still enter glitched warp pipes in certain circumstances, the results are much less interesting, as you simply find yourself transported to familiar locations in normal levels.
"These games are made up of sections called areas and pages," as Mario expert Kosmic explains in a new YouTube video. "The area is the entire level that you're currently in, and each area is divided up into chunks called pages." As you get near the normal entrance to a warp pipe, the values for the area and page you're supposed to be transported to are entered into memory.
"Going in a warp pipe without loading the warp zone fully will cause the game to send you to whatever destination is currently loaded into memory," Kosmic explains, which will typically be something dull like the destination of the current level's standard exit pipe. "However, if you go in a warp pipe while moving, so the screen scrolls as you go down, this can allow the warp zone to load after you've already entered the pipe. This causes the black screen transition to come up, and after this transition screen, Mario will always start on page zero."
With all that in mind, earlier this year, Kosmic began to experiment with making glitched entrances to other warp zones in The Lost Levels. The results were fairly disappointing, especially as he soon found he wasn't even the first player to try this, but there was one important discovery: you can warp to a glitched version of the special, post-game level B-4, which uses the level layout of stage A-3, which has a flagpole at the end.
Normally, level B-4 is a castle stage, which you'd finish by grabbing an axe just past Bowser, which in the code would increase the world count by one, resulting in a trip to level C-1. But in the A-3 level layout, you can instead grab a flagpole to end the stage, which instead increases the level count by one – taking you to stage B-5, a level that shouldn't exist. Unfortunately, the original Famicom version of The Lost Levels compensates here by simply sending you to the next stage in the normal list, and B-5 is identical to the standard C-1. You can continue playing through the normal end of the game, with the only difference being that the level numbering is messed up.
"Ultimately, this wasn't all for naught," Kosmic says, "because Simplistic was watching my stream. Simplistic is one of these legendary Mario scientists we have in the community that is constantly answering questions, [and] working on new tools for us. You'll often see his name in the special thanks section of my videos. After watching the disappointing end to my glitched levels journey, Simplistic swooped in and saved the day."
Within 24 hours, Simplistic revealed that there was a use for this warp glitch in The Lost Levels – not on the original Famicom version, but in the game as it was presented in the Super Mario All-Stars cart on Super NES. The key difference here is that you can save and quit in the All-Stars version, and loading up a previous level works differently than going there in the standard course of the game. Soon, Kosmic fired up his own childhood SNES cartridge to find out how deep this could go.
"The menu select works properly for all the normal levels," Kosmic says, "but the system breaks when you start selecting levels you weren't supposed to." Start reaching glitched levels like B-5, B-9, and B-A – the numbers turn to letters once you get to double digits – and you'll continue to see familiar levels that you can continue playing through as normal, because the game is still reaching for information within its normal parameters.
But once you beat B-D – corresponding to level D-4, the normal end of the game – that's where the fun begins. "This is the official start of hitting glitched values and getting glitched levels," as Kosmic explains. Things start normal enough, but through an increasingly complex chain of level completions and glitched warps, which I'd recommend watching the video in full to understand, things start to get, uh, weird.
Underwater levels are turned into platforming stages. Levels are overlaid with increasing amounts of junk visuals, making the whole thing look incomprehensible. The image above is from one such level, which, incredibly, Kosmic manages to play through in part by remembering its corresponding layout from the normal stages. To me, it looks like a psychedelic hellscape by way of the Matrix with all the numbers across the screen.
Finally, 39 years after the original Japanese release of Super Mario Bros. 2, its Minus World has been discovered. These stages have "secretly been accessible all this time" – well, at least since the launch of Super Mario All-Stars – and assuming you can perform the speedrun-level techniques needed to reach them, they're just sitting on an old SNES cart you might still have lying around.
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