Amazing Super Mario Bros 2 Minus World Lost Levels Found After 40 Years, Must See

One of the most infamous game glitches of all time is arguably the Minus World glitch in the original Super Mario Bros. on NES, which allowed gamers to access glitched levels not meant for end users. Now, almost four decades later, an equivalent has been found in both the Japanese release of Super Mario Bros. 2 and its American Lost Levels equivalent. Previously, Nintendo patched the Minus World out of all subsequent releases of SMB1 and its Japan-exclusive sequel, but it turns out there was still a way to warp to additional levels. Like the original Minus World glitch, you also get different lost levels depending on whether you're playing with the NA or JP versions of the game, though these aren't technically "Minus" worlds since they don't give a negative level counter. They're almost "Positive" worlds since you take the level counter higher than the 4 its normally capped to, but like with the original glitch, the new levels have glitched visuals and enemies behaving unusually.

In fact, the farther you progress in the new glitched levels, the more severe the visual glitches become, to the point the game becomes almost unplayable. But speedrunners like Kosmic (who publicized this find and is the most prominent Super Mario Bros. speedrunner today) are nothing if not determined, so he managed to progress to the point of forcing the game to crash on both the NA and JP versions of Super Mario Bros. 2 (The Lost Levels). In fact, he even started with the original Famicom Disk System version of Super Mario Bros. 2 before learning that it was possible to progress even farther in the Super Mario. All-Stars remaster of the game. It was actually necessary to find the truly new content, since the glitched levels in the original release are just relabeled standard stages proceeding after the original world B-4. (So, C1-C4 labeled as B5-B9 in the Famicom release.)


So, once you get to the new glitched levels in All Stars, what is the experience actually like? Well, the visuals and certain physics interaction will get glitchier and glitchier as you go, but all the levels are still ultimately based on the layouts of existing stages. So, keeping a map of existing levels on hand is helpful for navigation, and Kosmic even brought up one on his stream so that his viewers could follow the action behind the inevitable pixel-junk of it all. Once you make it that far, clearing enough levels will simply crash the game.

Well before that point, though, you have to raise the glitched level counter far enough to unlock the additional levels! And in All-Stars, even B-7 can soft lock you with an uncrossable gap, thanks to spring type (and thus jump height) being determined by the world you're in. B-7 (which is expecting C-3) spawns a red spring in place of a green spring, making it impossible to progress...but with the help of the Save, Quit, and Save File Reload functionality of All Stars, it becomes possible to progress past these soft-locks since loading a level from a file results in a different result than just playing through the previous level.

But there is one actually fun-looking Lost Level buried in the Japanese release of Super Mario All-Stars. That level is B-E, which has glitched visuals but not to the extent that you can't tell what's going on. It's actually a land-locked version of 6-2 from the main game, which is usually an underwater level. The transformation transforms the swimming fish Cheep-Cheep enemies into Bullet Bills, and maintains the original flying squid Blooper enemies from the underwater stage. Interestingly, underwater enemies floating in the air actually originated with the Minus World of Super Mario Bros. before being subsequently canonized in 2/The Lost Levels. However, the game has no check for swimming fish above ground, so it replaces them with Bullet Bills instead, and this actually results in gaps that can only be crossed by jumping with perfect timing while boosting off the Bullet Bills as a platform.

It's a fascinating full-circle moment for 2/The Lost Levels, to be sure. A sequel with design decisions shaped by glitches including the Minus World was thought to have patched out all additional levels entirely, but it turns out that 2/The Lost Levels still had its own methods for unlocking additional glitched content. Like the original Minus Worlds (at least in the JP release—in the NA release, there is only 1 endless stage instead of 3 new ones) meaningful changes to your technique are required to progress thanks to enemies behaving in new, unforeseen ways off of the beaten path.

This discovery also makes me wonder what would happen if we tried to feed these levels to the Commodore 64 port of Super Mario Bros, or (God forbid) the AI that plays Super Mario Bros. Something tells me that either machine would most likely have a seizure, considering how little the Super Nintendo seems able to handle these glitched layouts.

Author's Note: As stated, references to Super Mario Bros. 2 in the article above refer to the Japanese release, which eventually came to the US as "The Lost Levels". The discovery of further Lost Levels within The Lost Levels is an irony that did not elude us, but made writing and titling this article much harder. The United States version of Super Mario Bros. 2 was referred to as "Super Mario USA" once released in Japan, and is itself a reskinned version of Japan-exclusive platformer Doki-Doki Panic, which also has an alternate dimension "Subspace" that may have been inspired by the Minus World glitch.