Over the years, Nintendo has made tons of fantastic spinoffs based on its iconic red-capped plumber. From Mario Kart and Mario Party to Luigi’s Mansion and Wario Ware, the charming world of the Mushroom Kingdom transcends genre boundaries. But there’s one Mario side hustle that’s never quite gotten the same opportunity to blossom into something bigger: Mario Paint.
Released in 1992 for the Super Nintendo, Mario Paint sold just shy of 2.5 million copies worldwide. That ranks among the platform’s top 20 best-selling games, just above Super Mario RPG and a few notches below Chrono Trigger. It wasn’t really a game in the traditional sense, but an approachable digital art studio that also featured a music composer, a pixel-art editor, and tools to make simple animations. Mario Paint was bundled with the SNES Mouse and a simple plastic mousepad, which were required to play it.
Despite its popularity, Mario Paint never got a direct sequel… outside Japan, anyway. The closest Nintendo may have come was when it launched Mario no Photopi for the N64 in 1998. The Japan-only game allowed players to upload their own digital camera photos and alter them with cute frames and stamps, like those Print Club photobooth stickers. The company also sold optional clip art packs featuring Hello Kitty, Bomberman, Yoshi, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. If learning about this for the first time makes you jealous, I’m right there with you.
Nintendo’s subsequent creativity games instead veered into simplified game design. First there was 2010’s WarioWare DIY for the DS handheld. The premise was simple: Mario’s doppelganger is too lazy to make his own minigames, so you have to do it for him. You’ll create art, animations, and program simple rules to build unique five-second game experiences. WarioWare DIY also has a basic music composition suite and allows you to draw simple four-panel comics.
Then came Super Mario Maker for the Wii U in 2015, the platformer creator that allowed players to design their own Mario levels. It sparked a resurgence in the Kaizo community, which creates extremely difficult levels to test players’ skill and determination. Mario Maker also spawned countless viral moments, with streamers and YouTubers failing, over and over again, to clear death-gauntlet stages that were all but impossible for even the most accomplished players. It was nominated for Game of the Year at the 2015 Game Awards, where it lost the top honors to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. (Fair enough!)
Mario Paint wasn’t an especially complex art toolkit, and frankly, it never needed to be. It was a low-stakes casual game long before those were commonplace. It was a pleasant way to pass the time when you didn’t have the gumption for a punishing platformer like Super Metroid or the hours of free time demanded by something epic like Final Fantasy 6. As a kid, I probably colored that image of Mario riding Yoshi with the tall, blobular hills in the background more than 100 times. Mario Paint scratches a very specific itch. A new version would be absolutely perfect for a plane ride or a long subway trip.
Arguably, the creative toolkit in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream shares some DNA with Mario Paint, thanks to all the characters, clothing, food items, and buildings you can customize. But bringing your vision to life in Living the Dream can be intricate and fiddly, where Mario Paint is very much not. Let me color scenes and character art from Yoshi and the Mysterious Book or Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave. Let me compose some ditties based on sound effects from Animal Crossing: New Horizons or Donkey Kong Bananza. I don’t need anything complicated here. In fact, I’d very much prefer that a Switch 2-era Mario Paint was anything but complicated.
There’s a part of me that bristles every time Nintendo releases a lightly refreshed remake of an older game for an MSRP of somewhere between $50 and $70. This coexists alongside a part of me that would eagerly pay Nintendo this same amount of money for a new version of what basically amounts to a glorified coloring book with cute imagery, stamps, and sound effects. Why are you booing me? I’m right!
As the world waits with bated breath for a Super Mario Paint that may never come, folks with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription can check out the original Mario Paint in the SNES games library. It’s compatible with the Switch 2’s mouse controls.