How Mario Paint tried its best to topple MS Paint
Mario Paint (1992)
Mario Paint (1992)
In the pre-Internet days, if you wanted to have a bit of fun on your computer, there weren’t too many options available to you. Command and Conquer and Civilization II were always great, but they could get very difficult. What if you’d just been thoroughly trounced by the computer AI, and you couldn’t face the thought of going back into the arena?
You always need something to fall back on. Inevitably you found the games on your PC, whether it was Solitaire or a bit of that delightful Space Pinball game. Even Minesweeper helped bridge the boredom gap at times. Once those options were exhausted however, and once you finally gave up trying to understand Hearts, Spider Solitaire or Reversi, you eventually turned towards trusty old Microsoft Paint.
I know that it is sad in the extreme to have loyalty and nostalgia towards a computer drawing application. But honestly, I’m telling you now - give me MS Paint or give me death. If I need a quick screenshot for work, or if I need to draw an insulting caricature of a colleague, MS Paint is the tool to use, every time. It’s quick, it’s easy, it doesn’t cost you a penny, and it always gets the job done.
I often see people looking for the best deals for buying Adobe Photoshop, not to mention they’re always looking for tutorials on how to use the tool as well. In particular, people are always seeking help with something called layers. Well, Paint doesn’t know what layers are, and it doesn’t want to know either.
You better believe me when I say that Photoshop is for cleanshirts - did you know that if you load up an image of dollar bills in Photoshop, it will recognise the pattern and block you from editing it, for fear that you might be trying to print your own notes? Who needs a nanny-state painting application like that?
Personally, I’d be lying if I told you that I was drawing works of art in Microsoft Paint in the late 90s. Actually, if you really want to know, the bulk of my old drawing portfolio was various parts of the human anatomy, but not just frontage - arse-age too, and often hairy.
I also liked to take MS Paint’s curved line tool and spin it around the screen, pretending it was a helicopter rotor. For the sake of realism, I would supply the noises myself. See, it’s things like this that you just don’t get in your Fortnites, your Minecrafts and your Robloxes nowadays.
But you know, it’s not as if PCs were everywhere in the late 90s either. They certainly weren’t in every household. They also cost a goddam fortune as I remember: I believe our first PC back in the year 2000 cost £1,900, and that was big, big money. I’m now typing this on a €400 laptop that has the ability to load up MS Paint a hell of a lot faster. Funny that, eh?
That’s a hell of an amount to put down, and that’s before you even get any drawing software onto your new machine (assuming you’re too snobby for MS Paint). Budding artistes who want to get into digital drawing may fear that all is lost, given that it’s generally not a very profitable profession for new starters.
Well you need worry no more because I’m going to knock your creative socks off: what if I told you that you can have a powerful drawing application right at home, for very little cost, and it even runs off your humble old games console? That’s right, it’s Mario Paint, and it’s certainly one of the oddest games in the Super Nintendo’s back catalogue.
For starters, the game comes in a big box with a mouse and mousepad. Yes, that’s right, a SNES game that’s mouse-operated, for all your drawing needs - no longer will you have to desperately seek a creative outlet by using your controller to draw crude shapes in the grass in Zelda.
To play the role of an expert mouse advisor for one second though, the old SNES Mouse that comes with this game is a wee bit clunky, to say the least. You won’t be doing much fine detail with it, I can tell you that, unless you have hours to spend. And if you don’t have free hours to spend, then what kind of creative are you?!
To this date, and to my knowledge, the Mona Lisa has not been replicated on Mario Paint. But don’t start screaming in impotent fear, because you can use all kinds of fun brushes, badges, stamps and more in Mario Paint to make your own little scene. Fancy drawing a little flipbook animation? That’s available to you as well, although that’s with strong emphasis on little - you’re only allowed four frames of animation.
The best two features of the game aren’t anything to do with painting or drawing at all actually, which isn’t much of an endorsement to the game’s quality. But you know how it is - a bad artisan blames their brushes, right?
The first selling point here for your 50 cents (that’s if you buy the game loose - naturally, shipping will kill you on the big-box version) is a music composer mode. It’s a lot easier to use than the music composers you had on those old Nokia phones, and you’ve got a lot more instrumentation to play with here - you can forget those monophonic renditions of the Mission Impossible theme.
Mario Paint Composer became its own… I don’t want to say meme, so I’ll go even hammier and say subculture. Think of a popular song out there, and it’s likely that someone’s painstakingly done a Mario Paint rendition of it. Ah, I should mention that they actually use a custom piece of PC software that’s based on Mario Paint, rather than the real deal.
But how much originality is in any creation? It’s all about evolution and innovation, right? Well, I’m talking nonsense now, but believe me on this - there’s a Mario Paint interpretation of Toto’s Africa out there that’ll blow your mouse’s balls out. Go and give it a listen on YouTube if you want to experience some real art.
The second reason to grab Mario Paint, or more likely emulate it on one of your five home computers with proper mice, is the fly-swatting minigame. I once read that people were buying Mario Paint back in the day, not because they had any designs on being artists (perish the thought - it takes a fortnight to fill the screen with paint) but because they were desperate to play the fly-swatting game.
It’s addictive alright, although when you’re getting far into it, you sometimes feel like you’re about to crush The Little Mouse That Could into tiny pieces. That wouldn’t be such a disaster anyway, because I can’t even think of another game that uses the SNES Mouse right now, and I doubt I’d want to play them, either.
One you’ve gotten your money’s worth with the composer and fly-swatter modes, you’ll exit back to the painting screen and find yourself sitting there in a slightly uncomfortable silence, as you realise just how obsolete this game is nowadays.
Yes, this was hardly a game that was ever going to stand the test of time. But for a little preview of the future world of computer aided design, Mario Paint was a cute moment in design history. Its contributions to the art world were a lot less sinister than Eric Gill’s, let’s say. Mario Paint’s moment in time is a highly forgettable moment, but it’s kind of cool to look back on those pre-Internet days.
Speaking of the Internet, we know that it’s full of the most interesting characters, and I do mean that in the most condescending, patronising way possible. So I’ll say this: if anyone out there, even just one person, owes their successful art career entirely to Mario Paint, I want to meet you. In return… you can paint me like one of your Italian plumbers.
17 January 2025