Nintendo

Stage Debut

Nintendo exclusive

Developed as a follow up to the Japan-only Mario Artist: Talent Studio for the Nintendo 64DD, it involved taking a picture of the player with a Game Boy Advance, transferring it to the Gamecube, and having it mapped over a cartoonish character model's face. The game was never released, but some aspects were reworked into concepts used for the Wii's Mii and Wii Sports years later.

Released: —
Platforms: GameCube
Genres: —
Developers: Nintendo
Publishers: Nintendo

About

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.

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Reception

Nintendo World Report described the Mario Artist series as a "spiritual successor to Mario Paint". IGN collectively described the Mario Artist suite as a layperson's analog to professional quality graphics development software. They stated that the combination of the 64DD's mass writability and the Nintendo 64's 3D graphics allowed Nintendo to "leave CD systems behind", by offering "something that couldn't be done on any other gaming console on the market" to people "who want to unleash their creative talents and perhaps learn a little bit about graphics design on the side". The designer of Paint Studio, Software Creations, roughly estimated that 7,500 copies of that game may have been sold.

IGN rated Paint Studio at 7.0 ("Good") out of 10. Peer Schneider described it as a powerful, affordable, and easy-to-use 2D and 3D content creation tool unmatched by other video game consoles, although minimally comparable to personal computer applications. He likened it to an edutainment version of Adobe Photoshop for children, and a good neophyte introduction to the Internet. He considered Paint Studio to embody Nintendo's originally highly ambitious plans for 64DD, and to thus suffer greatly due to the cancellation of most Paint Studio-integrated disk games and the application's incompatibility with cartridge-based games.