“What am I playing, man?!” “Speedrunner” discovers previously undiscovered Mario level after 39 years

Quick, everyone gather together. New Mario levels just dropped.

You heard me. new level. In Mario. Specifically, Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels is a game that was first released in 1986, and you'd think everyone would have discovered every secret in it.

No. There is much more to be discovered. A speedrunner named Kosmic managed to discover more than 20 previously unseen things (sometimes even Very After a lot of community help, experimentation, patience, and jumping off the spring, there are a few glitches) playable levels in the game.

Kosmic documented his entire journey in a 40-minute video, which I highly recommend watching because he does some crazy stuff and explains in detail how and why it works. But very, Very Basically, in the original Super Mario Bros. and its sequel The Lost Levels, the game determined which level and world to send you to at the end of each level based on the objects you “used” to clear the level. Grabbing the flagpole increases the “area” number by 1 (the “2” in “1-2”), while grabbing the ax on the castle bridge increases the “world” number (e.g. sending you to “2-1” after defeating “1-4”).

Then there's the warp pipe. The Mario community has been aware of the infamous “minus world” glitch for years – the infinite loop of water levels accessed by going 1-2 into a warp zone where the zone won't fully load and the pipes haven't been set up to send you to the correct world and zone. In the original Super Mario Bros., doing this and then entering the leftmost or rightmost pipe would send the player to a level designated as “World-1”, or a negative world. In Lost Levels, this glitch is eliminated, and the pipe sends the player to whatever destination is currently loaded into memory. However, if you enter the pipe while moving, the warp zone can load after you enter, and you can trick the game into sending you to the very beginning of the zone that the pipe wants to send you to.

It's all pretty complicated and, to be honest, it makes my head spin. Kosmik's explanation is again the best, but the shorter version is that using a combination of flags, axes, and pipes you can manipulate the game to send you into increasingly chaotic areas. You can force the game to load weird stuff like worlds 2-5, 2-9, etc. This strange situation is compounded in Lost Levels, specifically the Super Mario All-Stars version, because the game has save states accessible from the menu, which will save your access to these strange worlds, but will load them differently if you access them from the menu rather than from the previous world.

Kosmic is able to combine all of this and start loading up world after world that surpasses The Lost Levels' alphabetical bonus levels. First, he went from B-4 to B-5, then B-6, 7 and 8. After some difficulties, he reached BA, BB, BC and BD. So far, all of these levels are basically just repeated versions of other levels, albeit with a few oddities here and there. But after BD, it's unclear what will be loaded.

The answer is BE. At first, this seems a bit silly. Mario was then briefly imprisoned:

The only way out is to save and exit. Kosmic escapes and heads to BF, starting a series of repeated normal levels. From here, he made it all the way to BL, before a spring and a giant pit stopped him from continuing. But he can still load all these levels from the menu for different variations, BH results like this:

Things get even weirder from there:

In total, Kosmic discovered more than 20 “new levels,” ranging from levels that are nearly identical to existing ones to outright chaos like the one seen above. Ultimately, playing them just brings down Kosmic's game, and they may not be that fun from a platform perspective, but they look cool.

So why did it take 39 years to find these levels? Kosmic has the theory:

“Fewer people are playing Lost Levels than the first game. This trick is baked into the game, like it's in the bonus world, not even in the overworld. To see the full scope of the glitch, it's only available on the All-Stars version, and it's a little technical… but I'd say the main reason is that it's actually really hard.”

Kosmic demonstrates this in his video. The hardest part is entering the pipe when the warp area is not fully loaded, which requires a very precise understanding of your movement and where the camera is currently. Some levels are easier to maneuver than others, but for this glitch to work, there's one particularly tricky twist area that Kosmic had to do some very specific tricks to master.

Congratulations to Kosmic and the entire Super Mario Bros. community, they now have a bunch of weird new levels to play, and sure, it's never too late to discover something new about a classic video game.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at IGN. You can find her posts at BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Have a story tip? Send it to [email protected].