Facebook coders compete to create ‘ultimate’ Mario level

More than 150 Facebook employees recently pooled their talents in an attempt to create the ultimate Super Mario video game level as part of a two-day hackathon event, with the winning entry set to be featured in an upcoming Nintendo title coming out this fall.

According to Wired and Engadget reports, Facebook representatives gathered to try their hand at creating levels using the soon-to-be-released Super Mario Maker for the Wii U. During the 48-hour challenge, more than 40 different levels were created by employees from all parts of the company, with members of the culinary team coding alongside engineers.

The room itself where the hackathon took place was said to resemble a giant Mario level itself, with the game series’ iconic pipes and piranha plants present (presumably to help get the creative juices flowing). Participating teams spend more than 10-hours on average painstakingly creating interesting and challenging levels worthy of being featured in the upcoming title.

Engadget said it was clear the Facebook employees “took level creation seriously,” as many of them “storyboarded their levels on whiteboards” and some even went so far as to “draw up blueprints of bricks and coins and plot out jump points with Post-it notes.” The only rule, the website noted, was that the creators had to beat their own level before submitting it.

Winning level features hearts, takes place on a pirate ship

Brandon Dillon, an Oculus software engineer who took part in the hackathon, told Engadget, “I think it’s great… it’s interesting to look at how Nintendo thinks about constructing levels.” Dillon added that the easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface of Super Mario Maker was an ideal way to design games, “but more than that, it’s got so much polish and love and charm.”

Dillion’s team developed a level known as “Bowser’s Timeline” in which a person would play through the Mario villain’s Facebook page, navigating through all of his minion’s many “happy birthday” wishes, determining whether or not they wanted to accept his friend request. As unique and interesting as this level sound, it did not win the competition.

Rather, the winning level was designed by a pair of Facebook software engineers named Doug Strait and Roy McElmurry, whose “Ship Love” level took place on a pirate ship and was, as the Wired put it, “an obvious homage to the social network’s coding attitude.” The coins in the levels are actually hearts, the website explained, and while Mario’s dinosaur sidekick Yoshi is there to lend a helping hand, in the end Mario must square off against Bowser.

And as one might expect from some of the world’s best coders, the levels were not exactly easy. As Dillon told Engadget, “There are people who made some pretty sadistic levels! I consider myself a competent Mario player and I couldn’t even get past the first screen of some of them.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)