One of Nintendo’s Strangest Experiments Just Hit the Switch... With Joy-Con Mouse Support
11It was the early '90s, and the Super Nintendo was enjoying huge popularity in Western markets. Heavy hitters like Super Mario World, F-Zero, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past had already landed, and Nintendo was branching out in some unexpected directions with experimental peripherals. At the same time, personal computers were just beginning to appear in homes. Most families didn’t have one yet, and even if they did, chances are it wasn’t something kids were allowed to touch unsupervised. Digital creativity tools were out there, but they were far from accessible. So when Mario Paint arrived in 1992, bundled with the SNES Mouse and its own mouse pad, it stood out. It was a far cry from what Nintendo had already released; there were no stages, no lives, no real structure at all. It was simply a digital art studio made for living room TVs. You could draw, animate, make music, and slap bugs across the screen. Now, more than three decades later, Mario Paint is available again, fully playable on Nintendo Switch with modern enhancements. It’s still a wonderful creative outlet that was way ahead of its time, and now a whole new generation gets to see just how inventive the Super Nintendo era really was.