This was a Patreon-voted topic and i'll be honest, I wasn't sure how to make this video. But you know what they say: Limitation breeds creativity! This is my first video to feature prominent interviews, and the insight they provide paints a wonderful story. I'll be back soon with an update video. But for now, please enjoy The Story of Mario Paint!
I was on high-school when our chemistry teacher wanted us to do for the final exam an original work about the cells and the chemical reactions on them, while other guys did models or other kind of stuff I used Mario Paint to made a 15 minutes-long animation , the teacher was amazed for that, I was proud because nobody did something like that... 28 years later I'm a professional animator and I still belive that it was Mario Paint the very first step on my career, thanks nintendo!!
I had a similar project and decided to make a cake, it got a C and nobody wanted to eat any of the cake (I wasn't the smartest, or strongest kid and certainly not popular but I always tried to be nice no matter how much I got bullied*). I wonder where'd I be today if I had a bit more encouragement from teachers and peers growing up (my parents were fairly supportive). *I'm still a nice guy but I'm a lot smarter now and have a more negative attitude since life's been pelting me with lemons but keeps hogging all the sugar so I can never seem to make lemonade. I shouldn't complain, I've got a job (perpetual entry level but half-ways decent pay), a roof over my head, a decent computer (I built myself) but never have the energy to be productive and end up wasting time of frivolous things.
That is amazing! My art teacher was similarly open minded and allowed me to bring in my SNES and Mario Paint to work on my final year end project in it.... She even had a giant AV cart with a big ass CRT TV on it parked in the corner just for me to use with it! I had aspirations to be an animator, and pursued the schooling for such a career path, my life lead me down a different direction. The projects I make on my RU-vid channel are the result of skill collecting over my life...., all that can be traced back to this game :)
@@grn1 I can certainly relate to that. Things are easier to judge in retrospective but ultimately we can never know how things could have ended up if something had been different. For good or bad, the things we lived made us who we are today. Highly creative people have a spark inside of them that can and should be stimulated, and the rest of us can only work really hard to achieve a level we are comfortable with. I believe anyone can develop a skill with enough time and effort, but the amount of time and effort required can be very large (I started learning piano at an advanced age, and I think I'm decent but not great). So, value what you have accomplished and spend your time doing the things you love, the things that make you feel good, and don't see them as wasting time on frivolous things if they bring you happiness. For example, watching this video brought me happiness. All the best man.
Now a software developer, I kind of forgot about playing Mario Paint all those years ago. Seeing Mario Paint again made me realise how superb the user interface was designed (colours up top and the tools at the bottom is such a clear separation), or the music composer which lets you write music without knowing what a note is. If someone like Microsoft tried to design a similar game, it would have come with a massive manual. The supplied examples is actually another stroke of genius, most software is a blank slate that expect you to know what you're doing. Microsoft could have collaborated with Disney to bungle of few Disney images to colour in (more image packs for additional fees, naturally) in MS Paint, they really did miss a trick there. I think it's a shame that Mario Paint and encouraging users to explore isn't a case study in HCI classes, the world would be a better place!
Intelligence isn't about the biggest vocabulary, it's about getting the most complicated idea out there in the simplest way. Nintendo were the masters of this.
4 года назад
Using James Rolfe’s (AVGN) childhood clip in that context was perfect.
Mario Paint was my first introduction to digital art and now I am an artist and animator working on an indie game of my own. Beautiful documentary Norm, thank you for doing this game justice!
When my dad bought me an MSX computer, I spent days on MSX PAINT. My dad said he was happy I’m learning to use a computer. I told him I was only having fun and not really learning anything. Now I have a Computer Science engineering degree specialized in interface design. Thank you dad for being much wiser than I gave you credit for.
kaydog890 actually bachelor Electrical Engineering’s and a master in Computer Science. When you finish an MSc in the Netherlands you get an “Engineer” title and are allowed to put the Ir. (short for Ingenieur) title in front of your name.
That lady isn't WRONG about wanting you to spend money on the new thing... it's just, like, that's how products work, forever. It's hilarious now to think that they thought the NES was THE videogame system for their entire life. Stuff REALLY used to move a LOT slower back then. Even before I was born in '89. I guess the fact that millennials have been multiple format wars is just not conditioning the adults back then had.
Luckily my father was a gamer. So whenever something new came out, I had it. Because he wanted it. Thanks to that I was the one kid with every console during the 80s 90s console wars
@Vazzaroth, Those days were also the boom of the PC gaming industry. I am not sure that my parents or anyone else I knew thought it was *the* console for life when we had tons of games on PC. I was fond LucasArts’ hidden gem, “The Dig”. I was also a StarCraft Guy.
Yup. I started making Mario paint videos almost 15 years ago because I saw those original ones all that time ago. He arguably started that whole sub-genre of music composition videos.
I never got good at it on mario paint but it made me appreciate his work. I understood how difficult it could get. For me, beaterator was the game for that sort of thing
I was super excited for this one, Mario paint was huge for me growing up getting it at around 10 years old I was immediately obsessed with the music making side of it and now all these years later I’m a musician and a professional sound designer (and I still dabble in pixel art and animation) I can undoubtedly thank mario paint for introducing me to creating music in software. Mario paint was the ultimate game back then for a creative kid with no outlets
Limitation absolutely breeds creativity. My own realization of this came when I was creating a character for a Vampire: the Masquerade game. The game took place is a modern setting, but after buying the skills I needed to allow the character to play the role I wanted (she was a 5’2” 110 pound ginger Englishwoman who was the group’s heavy hitter) I didn’t have enough left to make her able to drive. I went with it and decided that she didn’t know how to drive because while the character was older than the automobile, she thought it was a fad at the time and never learned. Her irritation at being so very, very wrong gave way to a refusal to learn. She was also extremely wealthy and had always just paid people to drive her places anyway. That was the character that taught me to have fun with limitations and how to get good storytelling out of shortcomings.
true but also most likely its the only clip of a celeb that the internet generation would recognize also the fact i believe its only clip any celeb im aware of has of themselves back then
I didn't come here for the feels but oh man I am getting nostalgic. I thought I was the only one who ever liked this game as a kid as none of my friends saw the appeal. So great to see how it inspired so many.
43:58 MPTV was the winner of the Nintendo Power Mario Paint contest that they had in the early 90's! I had always wondered if the person who made that was still around, or if there was any way we would ever get to see what they made in its entirety, since you could only show so much in a magazine. The shot at 24:06 is part of the page that showed the results/winners of the contest, since there were 16 winners in all; 15 got a free SNES game of their choosing and the grand prize was five SNES games. I remember entering that contest with what was essentially a pixel-for-pixel recreation of LTTP's Dark World map, with an animated Calgon (the bird) flying across it, but the hardest part was trying to figure out how to get the Dark World music into the video. Normally I guess you would need two SNES units, one to play LTTP's audio and a different one to play MP's video at the same time into the VCR. What I ended up doing was putting a microphone up to the TV speakers to record the music, but even then, I still had to figure out a way to transfer the sound from my tape recorder's 3.5mm output into the RCA inputs. Even now I can't recall how I did it.
@NintendoCapriSun every time I hear the mega man 2 Dr wily theme I think of the lyrics you made up for it. I can't remember how old I was when I first heard your lyrics but they've stuck with me all these years later
I received a SNES with Mario Paint for my 7th Birthday. Now I'm 34 and i work as an designer, animator, editor and photographer. In my spare time, I'm a musician. Thank you Mario Paint :)
I am a Graphic Designer and Art Director here in Brazil. Mario Paint holds a very special place in my heart... as it was my first experience with a mouse and digital arts in my childhood in the 90s. I remember that I also used my VCR to record bits and pieces together into a single animation. I created several "classic" narratives in my childhood hahaha. Excellent documentary, really Mario Paint was responsible for dictating the profession I have today, and I loved every second playing that cartridge. Thanks!
Mario Paint having a title screen that requires you to use the mouse to get into the game is actually genius. That one screen teaches you how to use the mouse and lets you play around with it to get used to it, before requiring you to use your newfound skills to click Mario to actually start the game.
There is so much great about this video. I will comment on one of the last lines. “Does limitation inspire creativity?” Absolutely! If everything is given to you, you don’t have to be creative. I had this on launch and it made me far more creative! Great video!
Middle school boys drew a lot of Mario Paint pr0n back then. I was at a friend's house and he was drawing some and his mom walked in. I had to go home.
Christmas '92, my Mom got an SNES, Super Mario World and Mario Paint for the family. I wasn't aware of Mario Paint before hand, but my Mom wanted to bolster my creativity further as I was drawing all the time. I spent so much time with Mario paint, I created animated videos recorded on VHS, would collaborate with friends, and make music...it's no exaggeration for me to say that I owe significant credit to Nintendo and Mario Paint for becoming an animator and starting me down the path to making music. 28 years later, and my kids have had a blast playing and coming up with goofy and wacky stuff in the game and both have said they'd love a version on the Switch. Thanks for this video, Norm; Mario Paint deserves to have its story told.
I was like 10 or 11 when I saw this game in magazines and I was incredibly hyped about it. It was a lot of fun at first but in the end, as I was not very creative, rather soon I realized it was not for me really and I didn't use it very much.
This channel is awesome. Thank you! It's comforting and very nostalgic to see the history of this as it is such a large part of my life and upbringing and makes me reflect on when these things were released and how they impacted my life growing up as a kid.
I can't be the only one that still has the hours of Mario Paint art, music, and animations captured on VHS tapes. I remember Mario Paint quite vividly being that I was 13 at the time it came out (Shortly after Hurricane Andrew decimated south Florida). Still, I was very creative, and was looking forward to using this new program since I saw it advertised in Nintendo Power during the summer of 1992. At the time, I was hoping Mario Paint was going to be what Mario Maker became 23 years later. The technology just wasn't there at the time. So last July I bought a Nintendo Switch and Super Mario Maker 2 as a 40 year old man. But Mario Paint will always have a special place in my memory.
Dude. I would give anything to have those VHS tapes I made as a kid.... I can trace much of what I do today to the exposure to digital art and animation from this amazing game!
@Erik Thank you for giving an example of one person with their name pronounced "Merry-o." I never thought that was a thing. Like, I would ask friends/classmates twenty-odd years ago (and I still have a bug up my ass about it, obviously) why they think it's pronounced that way when Mario Lopez and Mario Andretti exist and all I would get was a shrug.
5:47 donkey Kong Jr math is an underated masturpeice and I am heartbroken at the fact that this complete gem of a game was sold poorly. I personally believe that it is the greatest game on the nes and it deserves more recognition.
I'm a digital illustrator for a living partly because of Mario Paint. That game along with the VTech VideoPainter were my first exposure to digital art, and it enchanted me. I've upgraded to a 22" Cintiq since then, but I definitely remember where my roots are. 💜
@@explodingegg123 My main social media outlets are Tumblr/dA/Twitter as an artist but I _do_ have a speedpaint of one of my Zelda pieces on my channel here on RU-vid if you're interested in what Mario Paint eventually led to about 25 years later.😅
WarioWare D.I.Y. is the main reason I checked out this video, haha. I just wanted to see if it got a mention! It's probably one of my most played Nintendo games. It really helped kickstart my interest in game development in a time of my life where I really curious about that sort of thing! Here's hoping Nintendo makes a sequel some day. With the way internet culture is today, it could be as big as Mario Maker!
How wonderful to hear that all these people got their creative careers started due to Mario Paint! As a guy who's been working on drawing, animation, music and gaming stuff on and off for about 20 years, but never professionally, and also as a bit of a Mario nerd, this is really inspiring.
When my sister and I asked my grandparents to buy this game for us and told them it came with a mouse, they backpedalled and said they cannot take a mouse across the border. Amazing comprehensive work here. Thank you for this and your other docs over the years. A great companion piece would be Game Boy Camera and Printer.
Yeah, I have a very similar experience with the game boy camera! bought it from a bargain bin for 10 guilders (pre-euro Dutch currency) and spend weeks making Lego stop motion movies combined with hand drawn animations. But had to delete everything every time I'd hit the 30 pictures limit (or 60 cause my buddy had one too). so we would plan, make and then show whoever was nearby a short story that was finished in 60 frames. and then do it again but better. Was very a very useful creativity lesson in hindsight when I became a musician as an adult. eventually I bought a rom flash/reader device that connected with my printer port from Bungie in china that could rip the pictures and I could turn them into gifs and connect multiple animations of 30 frames together. all in glorious 128x128 black and white, nearly unwatchable on my 480x640 windows 98 CRT monitor XD. I might have some saved in my old backup folders, will upload and share them if I find em!
Frankly, my Mario Paint mice always survived fairly well. It has been my 486 mice that died like crazy on me as a kid. That said, I am happy for lasers in today's mice and the possibility to play Mario Paint on PC using emulators.
My parents got my sister and me Mario Paint for Christmas the year it came out. Many years later I still have it, and was overjoyed to watch my own kids play and create with it. So many memories!! Thanks for putting this together :)
Thank you for another thoughtful and passionate video. Loved the addition of interviews. Mario Paint was a favourite of my brother and I. I was so excited to see the Mega Man 1up sprite in the stamp portion- I spent hours making my own and all sorts of other sprites by studying my Nintendo Power and duplicating them exactly. There was a special Mario Paint insert in the 50th (I think??) volume of Nintendo Power. It had sprites for Metroid and a slew of other games to recreate scenes from video games. I own an Escape Room now, and my business partner programmed a video game with a puzzle inside. I got to do some of the sprite work, recreating the rooftops of an iconic street in our city. I was really proud of my work on that game, and I owe to Mario Paint.
I was always jealous of friends who had Mario Paint. Just something as simple as a mouse peripheral made it seem so fancy. Fascinating backstory on the pressure parents were feeling to give their kids something more creative. I think "edutainment" toys and tech like Leap Frog get shit on simply because they're easy targets. Mario Paint proves you can make that kind of content worthwhile.
Also important that it wasn’t about teaching basic reading or math. Too many years later academics would retort that NES, SNES, and Game Boy games were actually fantastic at teaching kids about exploration, agency, applied mathematics (particularly RPGs like Pokemon and other stat-heavy games), but that was not helping in the 90s.
In WarioWare D.I.Y., if you create a new minigame and name it "Mario Paint", the Mario Paint theme will replace the normal background music while working on your minigame. (Sadly, you can't use it as the actual music for your minigame.)
I used to hate in the 90s when I would go play Nintendo with my cousin in the living room and the adults would stare at our faces when we played instead of the game. They said we were hypnotized by the game.
It's always "a small but vocal minority". Historically, vocal majorities are very rare; apathy and timidity are far more common than the urge to speak out for social change.
16:25 why does that dude think that other video games have bad introductory design but mario maker is revolutionary with it? i hate to break it to him but that is every first level of every video game every made.
There was a contest on CTV during the Christmas holidays in 1993 called “A Magical Mario Paint Christmas Contest” where kids all over Canada sends their drawings and the winning drawings will be shown TV and won SNES, Mario Paint and $500 worth of other SNES games.
I remember that, too! I'd have entered, but I'd only JUST gotten Mario Paint for Christmas that year. Isn't Mario Paint it's own reward in the end, though? Aah, I had so much fun with it.
@@Octolicia I don't know about the politics being from the States, but Quebec ticks me off because thanks to them I have to have French language on a bunch of my games and on the ESRB ratings. It's annoying and makes the boxes and carts look weird.
My only memory of Mario Paint was that it was setup at my local doctor's office in the kid's play area. I was never intrigued enough to play it much though lol
I'm someone who got in to the Mario Paint scene when the first wave of Mario Paint music videos was hitting RU-vid, back in 06/07. It was a mix of SNES Mario Paint arrangements and the improved spinoff Mario Paint Composer at that time. Without the likes of TomBobBlender and cat333pokemon, I probably would've never found out about Mario Paint. I messed around with Mario Paint Composer back in the day myself, and, well, I'm still messing around with it, albeit a super souped-up version of it nowadays. Mario Paint has left such an impression on so many people that there's even a community still thriving to this day. We used to hang out on an old Proboards forum called the Mario Paint Hangout, though we've since migrated to our own Discord server of the same name. I don't know where I'd be without the years of Mario Paint; this old SNES game and it's derivatives have given me countless hours of fun and creativity.
Mario Paint was pivotal in my early obsession with video production! When making skate videos, I'd create the intro logos and credits in Mario Paint, dub them one by one onto VHS with a totally guess-timated 3 second duration, then continue to edit the skate video in continuity using multiple VHS units, editing tape to tape until finished, and then doing one final dub of the whole thing with music, hoping the whole edit would suit the pace of the chosen song. Those the good ole days! Thank Mario Paint - I don't think there was a game I spent more time on without even realizing it.
@@TheACanning No, I didn't wait. Why does that matter? I just figured I'd point it out for whoever that didn't know it. I didn't think I was posting any big revelation.
Honestly, this game was the reason we still have so many pixel artists and tilesetters today. That Stamp editor really was baby's first pixel art maker... besides MS Paint.
Had so much fun. It was so amazing to grow up, and own NES, SNES, N64, Wii, WiiU, NS, GB, GBC, GBA, N3DS, GEN, SCD, S32X, GameGear, SS, DC, PSX, PS2, PS3, PS4, PSP, Xbox, Xbox360, I bought my dad a Xbox one, never played it. And, a gaming PC. My parents spoiled me rotten, but because of that, my old gen always paid to enter the next gen easy. Now, just have my Switch, PS4, and PC. I was there, and I will always cherish being there for the whole start of console gaming.
It's such a shame they didn't make a mario paint for the wii u, it was the PERFECT console for it. I mean obviously I'm very happy we got mario maker but I still wish they did make one, it would've been so cool !
And technically there was a series based on digital art known as Art Academy which had two entries on WiiU, and holy shit people made amazing paintings with Art Academy: SketchPad, the DL game
you know, part of my brain was like "it's a video about Mario Paint, so what?" and the other part of my brain stood up from the table and yelled back "JUST SHUT UP AND WATCH IT, YOU MIGHT LEARN SOMETHING!" .. and now, at the end of the video, I must say, I am SO glad I watched this, it was worth it. I wish I still had my copy of Mario Paint.
Wow, I honestly didn't know Mario Paint sold that well. At the time I looked at it as a frivolous novelty as my brother had an Amiga 500 and I had spent a lot of time in programs like Deluxe Paint and Sonix. Mario Paint does pale in comparison to professional software but I don't think anyone else but Nintendo could have crafted and packaged something like that and made it work as well for the entry level user. It's definitely the perfect gateway to learning such skills. And it's a testament to their quality of craftsmanship that new uses can still be found for it today even by professionals.
I remember playing Mario Paint as a kid, and it was the first time I used a mouse. My family didn't have a computer at the time. I remember using the stamps that looked like characters from Mario World. I would set up some bricks and put Mario and the enemies on the screen and made it look like a level from Mario World. At the time I wished I could create playable levels, then years later Mario Maker comes out.
Nintemper Tantrums? My dad used to call it "Nintendo burnout" when my brother and I were kids. But he'd also tease us when we died to frustrate us more and egg on our angry outbursts. Presumably for his own amusement and also so he could go "Okay, you kids have had enough. You need to take a break and calm down" sooner and get his TV back.
Those Sesame Street games (as well as Mario 3) were some of the first games I ever played as a kid. I have such vivid memories of playing them, which just came flooding back to me.
I've always found it striking how, in those news segments, parents were often resentful of the development of the Super Nintendo, and angry that the new games wouldn't work on the old system. Obviously questions about whether parents could or should spend the money to buy the new system are valid, but the fact that they didn't understand that the technology was advancing and changing and that the newest technology is usually more expensive says a lot about how little so many people knew about computing back then.
@@Keithustus You're not wrong about backwards compatibility, my point is that these parents seem to express anger over a lack of FORWARD compatibility. Also a lack of backwards compatibility in the 1990's on a cartridge based system is a lot more understandable and forgivable than a lack of backwards compatibility in the 21st century on a disc based system.
Dana West, sure, of course, but that was the stupid vocal inept mom minority. Dads and the kids knew about 8- vs 16-bit processing from the great increases from Commodore to 286 to 386 to 486 to Pentium around the same time.
@@neverstepd7 Yeah, you can make an autoplay level and use music blocks to play music, but it's not the same as an almost-fully-featured MIDI sequencer like Mario Paint had.
This is one of my favorite gaming historian videos. I grew up in the GBA/GameCube era and got to play a little bit of Mario Paint at my aunts house, but didn't know much about it at the time. As an artist and a creator it was so much fun getting to learn more about what Mario Paint could do, and how it inspired so many young creators to pursue a career in media.
This episode is on a whole nother level, Norman. Great job! I was definitely one of those kids that hooked up my Super Nintendo to my VCR and recorded my art projects so I could save them! Might still have the tape somewhere!
mario paint is really an incredible tool, and the near decade i've spent making covers with the PC music program based on mario paint have allowed me to learn SO much about music. loved this video and the deep dive into the story of the game!
I was 12 when this came out, and I got it for Christmas. Around that time, whenever we'd go into any stores that had Windows computers on display, I'd open up paint and spend the whole time drawing while my parents were shopping. I loved this game so much. I wore down the mouse pad and the paint was worn off the mouse. A year later, The Lion King came out. By that point, I wanted to be an animator. At the time, it took almost 9 months or so for a movie to come to VHS. So armed with Mario Paint, my little TV/VCR combo, and my lion king music book, I recreated the whole movie in Mario paint (along with a few scenes from the snes game because of the limits to the frame rate). I wish I could say I grew up to be an animator, but I had kind of a rough time in my early adulthood. Though I am an artist and do a lot of digital work. Professionally, I work in graphic design as well as web development. On the side, I'm learning game dev. Mario Paint was my first foray into pixel art and I still love doing pixel art to this day. And I'm back to learning animation. I hope to make some indie games and use games as a method for storytelling. Thanks Mario Paint.
It's really cute that he got people actually working in the art/music etc. industry who found their passion for what they do now because of mario paint, and have them share their stories and love for this game.
"explain to him how people market things to make more money." parents felt like Nintendo didn't have their children's best interest in mind. Skip to 2020. LOOT BOXES!!!! SURPRISE MECHANICS!!!!! kids maxing parents credit cards. YAY
Hilarious and frustrating that parents thought technological upgrades were a rip off. It’s like “you’re telling me I can’t run the Witcher 3 on my 2002 PC?, they just want my money”
I spent hundreds of hours in this game as a kid. I only recently stumbled across my SNES mouse packed away with my mario paint manual and mouse pad. I've long since lost my actual cartridge, so I felt a bit sad when I did find all that.
LGR is such a frequent collaborator on this channel that I pretty much listen for and expect him in every longer video like this. He’s got such a great voice for voiceover.
"It inspired a generation of artists." I mean, I can't deny that. I played the hell out of Mario Paint back in the day. And now here I am making money with drawing.
