Nintendo 64DD Longplay: Mario Artist: Polygon Studio
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Mario Artist is an interoperable suite of three games and one internet application for Nintendo 64: Paint Studio, Talent Studio, Polygon Studio, and Communication Kit. These flagship disks for the 64DD peripheral were developed to turn the game console into an Internet multimedia workstation. A bundle of the 64DD unit, software disks, hardware accessories, and the Randnet online service subscription package was released in Japan starting in December 1999.
Development was managed by Nintendo EAD and Nintendo of America, in conjunction with two other independent development companies: Polygon Studio was developed by the professional 3D graphics software developer, Nichimen Graphics; and Paint Studio was developed by Software Creations of the UK.
Titled Mario Paint 64 in development, Paint Studio was conceived as the sequel to Mario Paint (1992) for the Super NES. IGN called Talent Studio the 64DD's "killer app".
Mario Artist: Polygon Studio, released on August 29, 2000, is a 3D computer graphics editor that lets the user design and render 3D polygon images with a simple level of detail. It has been described as a consumer version of the professional 3D graphics suite N-World, also by Nichimen Graphics. It was originally announced as Polygon Maker at Nintendo's Space World '96 trade show, demonstrated at Space World 1997 in November 1997, and renamed to Polygon Studio at Space World '99. It was scheduled as the final game in the original Starter Kit's mail order delivery of 64DD games, but it did not arrive on time, leading IGN to assume it was canceled until it was later released. The Expansion Pak and the Nintendo 64 Mouse are supported peripherals.
The idea of minigames was popularized generally during the Nintendo 64's fifth generation of video game consoles, and some early minigames appear in Polygon Studio in the style that would later be used in the WarioWare series of games. Certain minigames originated in Polygon Studio, as explained by Goro Abe of Nintendo R&D1's so-called Wario Ware All-Star Team: "In Polygon Studio you could create 3D models and animate them in the game, but there was also a side game included inside. In this game you would have to play short games that came one after another. This is where the idea for WarioWare came from."
The art form of papercraft was implemented by modeling the characters in Polygon Studio and then using Communication Kit to upload the data to Randnet's online printing service. The user finally cuts, folds, and pastes the resulting colored paper into a 3D physical figure.