Super Adventure Box: the 8-bit platformer hiding inside an MMO

Once a year, for about three weeks in April, a wooden box appears in Rata Sum and turns Guild Wars 2 into a Super Nintendo game.

It started as an April Fools’ joke in 2013. ArenaNet built an 8-bit platformer, put it in their MMO for a day as a gag, and the reaction was strong enough that they kept it, expanded it, and have been maintaining it for over a decade.

What is in there

World 1 is Sunny Glade, Dark Woods and Kingdom of Fungus, ending with King Toad. World 2 is Rapids, Pain Cliffs and Storm Top, ending with the Storm Wizard. Each has a hidden bonus zone.

World 3 exists as two test zones. World 4 has never shipped, and asking about it in map chat is a running joke with a decade of history behind it.

The three modes, and which one you want

Exploration Mode, formally Infantile, fills the level with Happy Clouds that build a rainbow bridge whenever you approach. The platforming is effectively removed. Rewards are cut and digging pays no baubles, and it exists so that anybody can walk through and see the place.

Normal Mode is the game as designed. No help, no unfair traps, just the puzzle.

Tribulation Mode is the wiki’s own words: “a grueling difficulty intended for hardcore gamers”. Invisible booby traps, blocked paths, and the design explicitly cites Cat Mario and I Wanna Be The Guy as inspiration. It exists to hurt you and it pays the exclusive skins.

Start on Exploration. Anybody who tells you that is cheating has forgotten that the mode was built by the same people who built Tribulation.

Baubles, and the purse

Baubles come in five values: blue is 1, green 5, yellow 10, red 20, purple 50. Your purse holds 250 at first and upgrades to 500, 750 and 1,000.

🔴 That cap is the newcomer trap. Fill the purse and further baubles are lost outright, so the first upgrade is the first thing to buy.

250 baubles make one Bauble Bubble, which is the currency Moto accepts outside the activity for skins and upgrades.

The skins are the reason people come back: six collections, from the blue Super Adventure set through King Toad’s greens and the Storm Wizard’s yellows up to the Crimson Assassin reds. They are pixel-art weapons in a game about dragons, they have been coveted since 2013, and they are checkable on the market for the ones that trade.

Why veterans get quiet about it

Ask which festival is best and enough people will say Super Adventure Box that it stops being a joke.

It is a complete second game, with its own music that people listen to outside Guild Wars 2, its own difficulty curve, and a sense of humour the main game never attempts. It has no dragons, no elder gods, no stakes at all. It is a box a character climbs into.

And it is gone for eleven months of the year.

That scarcity is the whole reason it stayed special. If Super Adventure Box were always available, it would be a mode people meant to try. Because it is April only, it is an appointment, and a large number of players who have not logged in since Wintersday come back specifically for a wooden box.