Mario Paint also contains one of the most beautiful soundtracks ever on a video game<p><a href="https://youtu.be/lb2jDNZ5JuQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/lb2jDNZ5JuQ</a>
I think I spent more time with Mario Paint when I was a kid than any other video game I've ever played.<p>It really had no reason to be anything like as good as it was, or as full-featured.<p>The music was incredible (even the sample sheet music!), the tools were incredible, and still hidden features and Easter eggs permeated the whole thing.<p>In retrospect I'm sure it was a bigger project Nintendo was working on to make the SNES a more general-purpose tool in people's homes at a time when most families couldn't afford a computer.<p>Whatever. So many good memories brought back by this!<p>Especially this. It's just joy in music form:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dkSZPP49bI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dkSZPP49bI</a>
> on the Super Nintendo that uses (comes with!) a separate mouse controller. I can name exactly one video game like this, ever.<p>There have been other games on other platforms that came with their own controller. The first one that comes to mind is BASIC for the Atari 2600. It came with a tiny membrane keyboard.
My favorite part of Mario Paint was always the music generator. I'd sit and play with it for hours... To this day I still enjoy listening to MPC (Mario Paint Composer) tunes on YouTube.
Love this game, still have my SNES with the mouse. Funnily enough PC ports like SimCity 2000, SimAnt etc, don't work with it. But Mario Paint holds up so well, great game to kill 15-30 minutes and relax your mind. Really want to get the sequel Mario Artist for the 64DD - had a full 3D modeling suite!
A masterpiece of marketing. I remember wanting this really bad, and asking/getting it for Christmas (along with Contra III) and I have no idea why. It’s a pain to actually use, being on a tv and using the mouse. You can’t save the files to your computer. We already had a Mac with MacPaint. A console is just not the right platform for a photoshop style game with a mouse.<p>Don’t forget, in inflation adjusted terms and given household incomes, games were expensive. Ones with extra peripherals doubly so!<p>It had a cool mouse game where you swatted stuff, which was nice.<p>It also had a music program, but I couldn’t compose for the life of me. And no internet with streaming to learn from others or share your creations, just magazines. (I still remember one preprogrammed Mario tune.)<p>I also remember being weirded out by making a pattern of checkerboard red and green, with units the size of a pixel. That made this trippy brown color when zoomed out that had weird effects at boundaries with other lines. (May be related to the CRT TVs everyone used for SNES at the time.)
I have fond memories of this game being the butt of many early digital jokes, but it's cool seeing how Nintendo repurposed the UI elements of Mario Paint for Mario Maker. Even the "UndoDog" makes a return as a fun, Clippy-esque character. Leave it to Nintendo to flip their dorkiest game into relatively large, modern franchise.
For about 2 years my mother got my Mario Paint creations as gifts for her birthday and Mother's Day. She loved them each time (while a little subjective). Still mentions them to this day.<p>So much creative fun inside one game.<p>There was also the Super Gameboy adapter which had some creative parts to it, probably inspired by Mario Paint. Especially the custom border creation one: <a href="https://youtu.be/6ArYj4-Ajs4?t=1186" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/6ArYj4-Ajs4?t=1186</a>. All while having the GameBoy game in the background! The other borders were also awesome. The one with the day&night cycle was very relaxing. The one in the cinema was funny (zZzZz) while the one with the crayons was quite captivating.
Strictly for artwork purposes, in case anyone has a Nintendo DS handy and a homebrew cart (or willing to buy the official release): Colors! is fairly impressive and had an active community producing a <i>ton</i> of artwork for a while <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors%21" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors%21</a> . It's particularly good on the original DS and DS Lite, which have a <i>pressure sensitive screen</i>, not just touch/no-touch.
Wow, this looks amazing I would have loved this. I had to make do until I graduated to Deluxe Paint 2 and Soundtracker on the Amiga. I did have a mouse and art program on the ZX Spectrum but it was hard work.
Gaming Historian did a great video on Mario Paint:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54bXwb5DfRI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54bXwb5DfRI</a>
> This 1992 "edutainment" title (a word seemingly devised to revile kids)<p>Funny, I remember having the opposite reaction — a game marked “edutainment” was one where my parents wouldn’t hassle me about playing it for hours. Odell Lake, Carmen Sandiego, Zoombinis… good times.<p>EDIT: oh man I just remembered SimAnt was considered edutainment too. That might have been the most hours I sunk into a game until Shogun: Total War.
This generation's equivalent is Google Tilt Brush in VR. Now open source [1] - maybe they'll add some music finally<p>[1] <a href="https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/01/the-future-of-tilt-brush.html" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/01/the-future-of-tilt...</a>
My cousin and I stayed up almost all night as kids recreating the ESPN SportsCenter opening on this game on a hot summer night in Staten Island. Da da da, da da da - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyBbi7tnL5w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyBbi7tnL5w</a>
Mentioning this game brings me back to the era of Flash videos of Albino Blacksheep. In particular, MarioQ, which is heavily Mario Paint-themed.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWYgz-fBZr8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWYgz-fBZr8</a>
See also: the whimsical "Fine Artist" program from Microsoft a year or two later<p><a href="https://classicreload.com/win3x-fine-artist-by-microsoft-kids.html" rel="nofollow">https://classicreload.com/win3x-fine-artist-by-microsoft-kid...</a>
You don't even need a SNES to make the Music, there are several remakes of that online!<p>e.g. <a href="https://minghai.github.io/MarioSequencer/" rel="nofollow">https://minghai.github.io/MarioSequencer/</a>
Wow, so much memories on this. My cousins loved it. I still have a dusty SNES w/ that game somewhere in a closet around my parents home. So glad to see it featured here. :')
my game <a href="https://nopaint.art" rel="nofollow">https://nopaint.art</a> takes a lot of inspiration from mario paint and kid pix