Lookin’ Back #27 – Mario Paint

A colourful trip down memory lane.

The SNES had, in my eyes, some of the best video games ever crafted for a console.  However, Nintendo have a history of doing unique things in the gaming sphere, with varying degrees of success.  (Virtual Boy, anyone?)  Possibly one of the most fondly remembered things about the SNES is not so much a game as an application, that being Mario Paint.

Released in 1992, Mario Paint was a creativity suite, which came packaged with a cartridge, mouse and mouse mat.  There were a selection of ways to draw in the game.  There was a selection of drawing tools you could use, as well as a selection of stamps and textures.  You could even create your own custom stamp designs to use.  If you were feeling really creative, you could create a short looped animation as well.  The only way to export these animations was to record them to a video cassette (remember those?) with the provided instructions.  Quite an effort for a few seconds of animation, admittedly.

Perhaps one of the most notable features with Mario Paint was the Music Composer that was available.  As you might expect, you could make music on it using a variety of sounds and effects, including such things as stars and even Yoshi sounds, from a time when he made noises rather than talk.  You could even change things such as the pace of the music, and could create some pretty sweet tunes with a bit of work.  If you look around the internet you can actually find faithful recreations of the composer software complete with the original sounds and effects.

When you’d finished with all the painting and composing, there was also a very addictive game that you could play.  The game was, for some reason, called “Coffee Break”, and involved you using the mouse to move around a gloved hand and a swatter and swat insects before they could sting you.  This game had only a handful of stages but they repeated constantly until you either decided to exit or ran out of lives.

Mario Paint has to go down as one of the most unique products in video gaming, and one of Nintendo’s more successful ones.  It’s possible to get a fully boxed version of Mario Paint now for around the £50 mark.  And, as previously mentioned, you can get a version of the music composer online if you look around.  But this was a surprising jewel in the crown of the SNES, and deservedly so.

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