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Oliver Brandt is a Contributing Pop Culture Writer based in Tasmania, Australia. Their focus is reporting on video games, film, and TV. They have extensive knowledge of video game history and communities both in Australia and abroad, animated films and television shows, and international cinema. Oliver joined Newsweek in 2024 and has previously worked at Men’s Journal, Parade, and more. They are a graduate of Curtin University. You can get in touch with Oliver by emailing o.brandt@newsweek.com. You can find them on X and Bluesky @chocobalt. Languages: English.
Contributing Pop Culture Writer
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Every once in a while, Nintendo uploads a new game to its Nintendo Classics service, a series of Netflix-like apps that host retro games from the company’s past consoles for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers to enjoy. Today, one of the company’s most interesting and unique games got released on the service: Mario Paint.
Nintendo announced and released Mario Paint on its SNES Nintendo Classics app on both Switch and Switch 2 today, with the game playable after a simple update to the app.
Mario Paint is a classic SNES game that was released alongside a curious accessory for the SNES, the Super NES Mouse, which as the name suggests was a computer mouse for the SNES. The mouse plugged into a controller port on the console, and could then be used in various software, including Mario Paint, which was sold bundled with the mouse.
The game is a collection of activities and minigames that make use of the mouse, such as a drawing suite, a coloring book, an animation tool, and a fly-swatting minigame called Gnat Attack. The most famous of the activities included in Mario Paint, though, is the music composer, which is a simple but still fairly well-featured music creation tool that lets players place notes of various kinds onto a musical clef to make a song. That song can then be played back, and can be used in the animation tool. It was one of the first music creation tools on a dedicated home console, and is remembered fondly by many in modern times.
The game came to Switch 2 likely in part because of the inclusion of the mouse pointer mode on the Joy-Con 2, with each Joy-Con controller bundled with the console able to be used as a standalone mouse. Original Switch players won’t be missing out, though, as Nintendo has also added USB mouse support to the app, which works just as well as the Joy-Con 2 in Mario Paint on both Switch and Switch 2.
Two other games that supported the Super NES Mouse on the Nintendo Classics service are now able to be played with a Joy-Con 2 in mouse mode or a USB mouse, too, with Nobunaga’s Ambition and Mario’s Super Picross now updated to include support for the mouse. The update also brought improvements to the app’s controls remapping and CRT filter, as well, and changed the name officially to Nintendo Classics rather than being branded Nintendo Switch Online.
