Super Mario Maker 2 hasn’t received an official update in over two years, but its community has kept it alive through sheer dedication — uploading, playing, and sharing levels long after Nintendo moved on. So when players started noticing their carefully crafted courses disappearing without warning, the outrage was immediate and completely understandable.
What started as a few hundred deleted levels has now crossed the 1,000 mark, and the real story behind the mass removal is messier — and more infuriating — than it first appeared.
What’s Actually Happening
Nintendo has been pulling Super Mario Maker 2 levels from its servers, citing “advertising content” as the reason. The common thread tying nearly all of the deleted levels together is a hashtag: #TeamShell.
Team Shell is a Discord server built around the Super Mario Maker 2 community — a place where players share their creations, find new levels, and connect with others who are still deeply invested in the game. Using #TeamShell as a tag in a level description became a way for creators to associate their work with this community. That’s it. No money changing hands, no actual commercial advertising involved.
Nintendo, apparently, sees it differently — and has been classifying those hashtags as “advertising content” in violation of its terms of service. Well-known creators including DGR, PangaeaPanga, and Ryukahr have all reported receiving notices from Nintendo informing them that their levels had been removed on those grounds. Some of the deleted levels had been sitting on Nintendo’s servers since shortly after the game launched in 2019.
The kicker: once a level is deleted by Nintendo, it cannot be reuploaded. Even if you strip out the offending hashtag and try again, the level is gone permanently. There’s no appeal, no second chance, and no recovery.
The Cheater Theory — and Why It’s Extremely Plausible
Here’s where things take a darker turn. The Super Mario Maker 2 community doesn’t believe Nintendo spontaneously decided to start enforcing this rule after seven years of looking the other way. The far more likely explanation, according to the community, points to a single bad actor.
The suspect is a user known as MT94 — once one of the most respected names in the Super Mario Maker 2 scene, who at his peak held the title of second-highest-rated creator in the world. That reputation collapsed when it came out that MT94 had been using multiple Switch consoles to challenge his own account, artificially inflating his ranking on the leaderboards.
After being exposed and losing his standing in the community, MT94 appears to have decided to get even. A user going by the name LMT — whose profile links back to MT94’s YouTube channel — took credit in a Discord server for being behind the wave of reports. In a message that has since circulated widely, LMT claimed to have “5 Switches reporting” and pledged to “destroy everything.”
Nintendo’s automated systems appear to have done the rest. Once enough reports pile up against a level, the removal happens — and in an especially brutal twist, accounts associated with deleted levels are also reportedly being suspended automatically, catching innocent creators in the crossfire.
To be clear, none of this has been officially confirmed by Nintendo. But the timeline, the specific targeting of Team Shell levels, and the public admission from LMT paint a pretty coherent picture.
A Community Left Holding the Bag
What makes this situation so frustrating is that the people being hurt are the exact reason Super Mario Maker 2 still has any life left in it. The game surpassed 26 million uploaded courses back in 2021, and that number has only grown since. The most dedicated players — the ones building the hardest, most creative, and most celebrated levels — tend to be the ones most embedded in communities like Team Shell.
Many of the deleted levels represent hours or even days of work. Some are widely regarded as among the best the game has ever produced. And because of how Nintendo’s system works, they’re just gone.
For now, DGR has suggested that creators worried about further removals re-upload their levels without any hashtags in the descriptions as a precaution. It won’t recover what’s already been lost, but it may protect what’s left.
Nintendo hasn’t commented on the situation, and there’s been no indication that the company plans to reverse the deletions or lift the associated account suspensions. That’s a familiar pattern — Nintendo’s moderation approach has drawn similar criticism before, including comparable complaints from the Animal Crossing: New Horizons community over the years.
What Fans Are Hoping For Next
Beyond the immediate crisis, this episode is a reminder of how precarious user-generated content can be when it lives on someone else’s servers — especially when the platform holder has largely moved on.
Super Mario Maker 2 fans have long been hoping for a revival, whether through a Switch 2 upgrade or an entirely new installment. A third game with expanded creation tools, Joy-Con mouse support, and a more robust moderation system would go a long way toward addressing the vulnerabilities that this situation has exposed. Until something like that materializes, though, the community is left protecting what it can with the tools available.
It’s a tough situation — and it’s a good reminder to pay attention to the kind of player-driven passion that keeps older games alive long after the developers have moved on. Similarly, games like Frostpunk, which just celebrated 11 million sales largely on the strength of a deeply loyal community, show just how much longevity a great game can have when players feel genuinely supported.
For those keeping up with the broader gaming landscape this month, the Xbox Game Pass April 2026 lineup is also making waves — a reminder that when platforms do right by their communities, players notice.
