The composer of the Mario Paint soundtrack, Kazumi Totaka, is still at Nintendo and most recently did the music for Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020).
Wow, you weren't kidding. I like a lot of VGM, but this was unexpected and probably the most minimal and beautiful VGM tracks I ever heard. If you know any similar ones, post em
Not quite as minimal but some of the SNES Donkey Kong Country music is quite similar (picking one track each soundtrack but there are a bunch of them, particularly water/forest/frozen/caverns ones):
I never played Mario Paint but the DKC games are still some of my favorites and had excellent quality in almost every aspect of the game. I still have the screwdriver bit needed to change the batteries on SNES games.
Edit: Just noticed this comment on the first DKC soundtrack, by Kyperok45: "Fun fact: all these songs together keeps only 64 kbs on the cartrige".
That one still builds up to a longer melody at the end while the Mario Paint track has a both slow and meandering feel to it that I guess isn't that common even for ambient stuff.
Wow, I've just noticed that a song I hear all the time on SomaFM's groove salad station, is mostly made from that Mario Paint track! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_PTaqmlC50
Most of original soundtrack tracks are designed to played on a loop. You can get an SPC music player (eg. ZXTune for Android) and listen to this on loop for as long as you like.
I think I spent more time with Mario Paint when I was a kid than any other video game I've ever played.
It really had no reason to be anything like as good as it was, or as full-featured.
The music was incredible (even the sample sheet music!), the tools were incredible, and still hidden features and Easter eggs permeated the whole thing.
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.
Whatever. So many good memories brought back by this!
> on the Super Nintendo that uses (comes with!) a separate mouse controller. I can name exactly one video game like this, ever.
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.
Don’t forget, in inflation adjusted terms and given household incomes, games were expensive. Ones with extra peripherals doubly so!
It had a cool mouse game where you swatted stuff, which was nice.
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.)
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 remember as a kid looking at screenshots and thinking it was basically Mario Maker. When a friend got it, I can remember the bitter disappointment from both of us that it was not indeed Mario Maker.
We did then have lots of fun in the composition thing...
Fun fact, the images were saved compressed, and the compression ratio depends on the content of your image, so it's possible to create images that compress so poorly there isn't enough room to save them.
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.
So much creative fun inside one game.
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: https://youtu.be/6ArYj4-Ajs4?t=1186. 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 ton of artwork for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors%21 . It's particularly good on the original DS and DS Lite, which have a pressure sensitive screen, not just touch/no-touch.
Oh wow, I had no idea that the DS/DS Lite actually had pressure-sensitive screens. I was wondering why no games I played ever took advantage of this, until I found this blurb:
> The ARM7 controls the touchscreen, and the ARM7 supplied by Nintendo that companies must use cannot determine pressure sensitivity, only whether a touch is registered at all or not.
I wonder why Nintendo would do that? Appears it was difficult to calibrate them correctly, might that be the reason?
My personal guess is that they weren't sure they wanted to keep that feature, but it came for free-ish with their hardware providers. So they locked it out so they could keep games forward-compatible with future devices.
Obviously the homebrew crowd doesn't particularly care about that kind of thing :)
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.
> This 1992 "edutainment" title (a word seemingly devised to revile kids)
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.
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.
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 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyBbi7tnL5w
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. :')
I have it set up on a raspberry pi for my kids and it works pretty well even with the mouse. One problem I have is that the mouse gets out of sync because the resolution of the tv the pi is on isn't 4:3 like the emulated window. I think if I set the resolution correctly the issue would go away. I use retroarch with snes9x core. Here's the command I use to get it going:
/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-snes9x2010/snes9x2010_libretro.so ~/Documents/Mario\ Paint.smc
https://youtu.be/lb2jDNZ5JuQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4EjGXRDOH0&t=1116s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIKdZ2827rM&t=2200s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp50IEHtYfk&t=1928s
I never played Mario Paint but the DKC games are still some of my favorites and had excellent quality in almost every aspect of the game. I still have the screwdriver bit needed to change the batteries on SNES games.
Edit: Just noticed this comment on the first DKC soundtrack, by Kyperok45: "Fun fact: all these songs together keeps only 64 kbs on the cartrige".
I love the DK "Bramble Blast" def my fav one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73n7HTcmb5g
Seems like all these DK soundtracks all use Korg Wavestation samples in the tracker.
Maybe also "Love is in the Wind" from RiME:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2gfNQP6lgY
That one still builds up to a longer melody at the end while the Mario Paint track has a both slow and meandering feel to it that I guess isn't that common even for ambient stuff.
https://youtu.be/tlwZEutyrX8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eFXPibI6-4
The only (but sufficient) reason to own this game.
If you're familiar with Hip Tanaka's work you can definitely see his influence shining through here.
You _might_ enjoy this mix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBLSP5pSqBU
It really had no reason to be anything like as good as it was, or as full-featured.
The music was incredible (even the sample sheet music!), the tools were incredible, and still hidden features and Easter eggs permeated the whole thing.
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.
Whatever. So many good memories brought back by this!
Especially this. It's just joy in music form:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dkSZPP49bI
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.
Here's mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eFXPibI6-4
Don’t forget, in inflation adjusted terms and given household incomes, games were expensive. Ones with extra peripherals doubly so!
It had a cool mouse game where you swatted stuff, which was nice.
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.)
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.)
We did then have lots of fun in the composition thing...
Took a good full minute to save, but it had a nice techno tune and blinking robot to occupy your time during the save.
https://twitter.com/BushytailSkwirl/status/13398054469836062...
So much creative fun inside one game.
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: https://youtu.be/6ArYj4-Ajs4?t=1186. 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.
> The ARM7 controls the touchscreen, and the ARM7 supplied by Nintendo that companies must use cannot determine pressure sensitivity, only whether a touch is registered at all or not.
I wonder why Nintendo would do that? Appears it was difficult to calibrate them correctly, might that be the reason?
Obviously the homebrew crowd doesn't particularly care about that kind of thing :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54bXwb5DfRI
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.
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.
[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/01/the-future-of-tilt...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWYgz-fBZr8
https://classicreload.com/win3x-fine-artist-by-microsoft-kid...
e.g. https://minghai.github.io/MarioSequencer/