| Mario Paint(SNES) |
In the 1990s, Edutainment and computers were a big deal, and the console makers were trying hard to make their products more "educational" so the "education elitist" parents out there would be more willing to buy their products for their kids - remember, this was BEFORE gaming was some kind of ageless subculture. Anwyay, one such product was Mario Paint, for the SNES.
Mario Paint was less of a "game" and more a "leisure productivity suite" of sorts. It consisted of a paint program, a pixel art program for making "stamps" for the paint program, an animation studio, a music studio, and of course, that crazy flyswatter game. It also included an array of crazy music, some of which made me think of aliens landing. Either way, it was a very interesting release at the time, as it came with a mouse and mousepad. Honestly, it was about a couple slices shy of Deluxe Paint for PC, or Graf-X II, you could do some pretty okay-ish things with it. I used to draw for hours either using stamps, or by hand, trying to draw a Bob Ross-like scene. But for a good example of what could be done, go look up The Brother's Chaps and their story of how Homestar Runner came to be - yes, Homestar Runner was created using MARIO PAINT! At least, originally. Today, Mario Paint, especially with it's hard to get mouse and mousepad, are rather hard to get ahold of for the SNES it seems, and quite valueable. However, most people today would learn to use Adobe Creative Suite or at least use Graf-X II for pixel art like I do (or 8-bit Painter like I do on my phone). But it still does hearken back to a time when companies tried to put a fun spin on mundane things to make their "waste of time" into something at least somewhat educational, if not productive.16-Bit Happy Trees - My experiences People probably don't know this about me but I like to draw, and am quite good at it, and have been since I was a kid. I won at least 2 local art contests as a kid, until my education elitist mom scared me out of it by saying "you can do this if you want to, but you'll hate the life you'll have as a a poor artist!". Another chink in my armor about life. And everyone wonders why I'm so cranky (there's a lot more from where that came from and elsewhere). So here we are, a program I can write music, animate, do pixel art before there ever was such a thing, and draw pictures on my tV. The time this came out one reason I wanted a computer at home was to draw pictures on it. And you know what, I'm sticking it to every boomer and old Gen Xer parent out there who had kids in the 80's and criticized all those hours "behind the screen" - you want to know what one of my #1 strengths at work is? DIAGRAMS! How did I learn how to make those? Pixel Art! Where did I learn how to do Pixel Art? I taught myself using Mario Paint and IBM Linkway in the 90's! So the next time you think all those "foolish video games" were a "waste of time", realize not all of us were participating in some social B.S. brigade for who has the biggest toy collection, and some of us had bigger fish to fry - like all those very clean diagrams I've made at work for how to connect your docking station at home over the pandemic. Oh sure, I could have drawn some lines like a stick figure but you'd probably be like "do I plug in the blue cable, or the white one? What ports are on my monitor? Do I plug the little connector into t the little connector on the dock or the computer?" - yeah, It's the "lazy spoild brats" like myself who LEARNED how to make it easy to connect your damn work computer at home, using VIDEO GAMES. Whodathunkit? It makes me angry how much bullshit Boomers and GenX put me through thinking I was just sitting there rotting my mind with something like Street Fighter! Har har, I was learning future job skills and neither of us even knew it at the time, so take that, HAH! |
