Well, this ended up being a slightly less productive month than I would’ve thought. Who would’ve known that a speedrunning marathon, a convention, and wanting to get out and enjoy the vibes of the season would’ve distracted me from work? Next month will probably be more of the same as I get a few more pool swims, summer walks, and, most importantly, two big conventions out of my way. The next part of my convention coverage is partway done; writing up about Garden State Anime Fest took me a bit more time than I would have liked, but I still wanted to get something out for the month of July. So, with that said, I’m digging up an old idea of mine from 2019.
I assume a game like Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo needs no introduction. Given its history as a major release for the console back in 1992, it has a long legacy of young players being inspired by it and desiring to become artists, animators, or music composers in later years. I didn’t get a hold of Mario Paint until roughly 2004 when I got a used Super Nintendo and, sometime later, the cartridge for the game and the mouse that originally came with it. None of my creations were exceptionally noteworthy, given that at the time I was more of a budding traditional artist and had not really drawn much on computers (outside of PC painting programs designed for young kids like Kid Pix, which is very comparable to Mario Paint’s own presentation). Nonetheless, I still got a lot of play out of Mario Paint in my childhood.
Fast-forward to a few years later and as artists nostalgic for Mario Paint poured onto Youtube, they would begin uploading art, animations, and music made in the almost 20-year-old game that looked genuinely impressive. From entire web series to recreations of a cartoon show’s opening (you probably know which one I’m referring to) to entire remixes of video game songs inside its own music-creation tool, Mario Paint still found ways to impress even after the SNES stopped being commercially produced and sold in stores. Nintendo themselves would make games referencing or including homages to Mario Paint, and just recently re-released the game onto the SNES Online app on the Switch and Switch 2—serving as the perfect showcase for the Switch 2 Joycon controller’s mouse functionality. In fact, that very re-release 30 or so years later was what made this a last-minute idea for July’s blog entry, as it reignited an idea of mine that I had considered making, only to abandon when other, bigger projects began piling up at my doorsteps.
In 2019, I began a modding effort of sorts named “Mario Paint: Pro Edition” This would have used the retro game modding tool YY-CHR to modify the game’s graphics, extending the colored palette of dithered and textured colors at the cost of removing stamps. The specific colors chosen for the “dithered” set were hand-picked by using Photoshop to merge a full set of combos of the 15 colors together in Mario Paint’s palette, then inserting the most distinct color combos back into the graphic banks of the game. Surprisingly, early tests showed it is indeed possible to make pictures using these edited colors/textures/stamps/etc, as they’ll all be drawn or pasted onto the canvas as the pre-existing graphics do.
The “Pro Edition” would include a fine brush for smaller details (with the removal of one of the other brush sizes... possibly the medium size?) but would keep most other functionality identical to the original game. I have thought about other features or edits from the original game, such as combining the two Mario Paint mods currently on Romhacking.Net and editing the color palette into something like a modern-day pixel art color palette. Most of these features and more are out of my possibility since it would require even deeper dives into the game’s coding and/or sacrifices to other parts of the game to free up space should the ROM not be expandable. And well, I don’t think there’s a desire to dig in and really expand the full capabilities of Mario Paint like what people have done with Super Mario World for decades. Maybe time will prove me wrong, but when modern paint programs like Clip Studio Paint and Aseprite can essentially replicate Mario Paint’s features and offer much more when it comes to basic drawing and animation, there’s very little incentive to revisit Mario Paint outside of nostalgia or the novelty of playing one of the first art games for a video game console.
And that’s all I got for this time. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next month for (hopefully) Part 2 of my convention coverages for the year.
