Every retro gamer knows the legend of the Minus World — that mysterious, looping underwater level hidden in the original Super Mario Bros. from 1985. For decades, it’s stood as one of gaming’s most famous glitches. But now, nearly 40 years later, it turns out the sequel had its own Minus World hiding in plain sight all along.
Speedrunner Kosmic, known for uncovering deep-cut Nintendo secrets, recently discovered a Minus World-style glitch inside Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels (the real Super Mario Bros. 2 in Japan). Both the Japanese and English versions already had a few bizarre glitched worlds that mess with level names and enemy behavior but the All-Stars version on the SNES hides a particularly wild one.
To access it, Kosmic had to navigate through a string of broken, bugged-out stages, specifically the B-worlds. When he hit a wall at level B-7, he found it impossible to complete. So he did what any determined player would do — saved, quit, and reloaded. That reset caused the level layout to completely change, opening a new path forward. A glitched warp pipe in B-9, marked by a single stray coin, sent him right back to World 1-1 but only this time, things weren’t quite the same.
Kosmic says this secret likely stayed hidden so long simply because of how difficult and obscure The Lost Levels is. With far fewer players ever reaching the later worlds, interest naturally faded until now.
It’s a fitting full-circle moment for fans of gaming history. Four decades later, Mario’s mysterious Minus World finally has a sequel which is proof that even in 2025, the NES and SNES classics still have secrets left to uncover.
