The Super Mario Maker online community had only one "unbeatable" level of play left, and time was running out before Nintendo's shutdown of the Wii U's online servers o April 8, and someone finally beat it. The level was called Trimming the Herbs, or TTH. With just a couple of days to go, player sanyx91smm2 beat TTH. Yay! You can see from the video above that it's just insane, even though play is less than 30 seconds long.
But with all the accolades for sanyx91smm2, game developer Ahoyo had received praise for years, because he was the one who designed TTH back in 2017. Around a month ago, it was revealed that Ahoyo bypassed the rules for Super Mario Maker and created the level with the assistance of an automated tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) technique, and did not label the level as such. The admission rocked the online gaming world, and Trimming the Herbs was disqualified as the last level of Super Mario Maker. Yet because it was such a difficult challenge, players still tried to beat it, and Sanyx finally did it.
So what happened back in 2017 that got TTH designated as the hardest level? Ahoyo tells the story of how it happened at Ars Technica. Sure, there were reasons for using TAS, but not labeling it as such was an egregious move that went unnoticed for seven years.