Mario Paint arrives for Nintendo Switch Online, finally can reach its potential after 34 years

Ahead-of-its-time game’s time has finally come.

As part of its Nintendo Switch Online service for the Switch and Switch 2, Nintendo gives subscribers access to a library of Nintendo Classics, noteworthy titles from the company’s 8, 16, and 64-bit eras. There’s a highly appealing nostalgia in playing video games that laid so much of the foundation for what the hobby is today, but the newest old-school addition to the Nintendo Classics lineup is one that’s only now going to get the chance to realize its potential for the first time.

When Mario Paint first came out in 1992 for the Super NES/Super Famicom, it was a pretty bold experiment by Nintendo. In addition to letting players create illustrations and simple animations, it included tools for making music tracks as well, with a clever format that was easy to intuitively grasp, even for people who had no background in musical composition or reading sheet music.

But there were a couple of problems with the concept, largely due to the technology of the day. This being the pre-home Internet era, the Super NES had no online connectivity. If you wanted to show your friends the cool picture you’d spent hours and hours painting, or have them listen to the catchy song you’d composed, they’d either have to come over to your house, or you’d have to take your Mario Kart cartridge over to theirs (assuming your friends also owned a Super NES). Oh, and unless you wanted to take an extended break from creating, you’d have to arrange those meetups quickly, since the cartridge had a very limited capacity for storing the art and music you’d crafted.

Games in the Nintendo Classics series are presented just as they originally were, so there are no additional save slots within the Switch Online Mario Paint, at least in the conventional in-game sense. However, Nintendo Classics games do allow the player to utilize a number of save states, effectively multiplying the number of illustrations you’ll be able to preserve in their still-editable status. More importantly, though, with the Switch and Switch 2 having built-in hardware capabilities for taking and exporting screenshots and gameplay videos, suddenly the sky’s the limit in terms of not only saving completed Mario Paint projects, but in sharing them online with people around the world.

▼ The Japanese Nintendo Classics Mario Paint preview features some different video clips than the English one.

But why is Nintendo just now getting around to adding Mario Paint to the Nintendo Classics catalog? Because it was designed to be used with the SNES Mouse add-on, and the recently released Switch 2 is the first Nintendo console to have mouse capabilities as part of its standard hardware, via the edge of its detachable Joy-Con controllers.

As for Switch (i.e. Switch 1) users, they can still join in on the Mario Paint fun by connecting a compatible USB mouse, as there’s no official mouse for the system. That’s also an option for Switch 2 users, if they prefer a conventional mouse to the Joy-Con.

Mario Paint is playable right now, having been added to Nintendo Classics as soon as it was announced, since with 34 years of pent-up creativity, there’s a lot of art to be made.

Source: Nintendo
Top image: Nintendo
Insert images: Nintendo, YouTube/Nintendo of America, YouTube/Nintendo 公式チャンネル
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