By Toby “Radiation” Fox

Oh, I’m sure I’m dating myself by saying this, but I had Mario Paint when it first came out, when I was a kid. Like, on a plastic cartridge, with that ridiculous cheap, garish SNES mouse that came with it. There’s probably quite a few kids whose first creative art or music projects originated on a television, waiting seconds for their multimedia Mario Paint masterpiece to be saved to the cartridge’s RAM chip.

In case this is completely foreign to you, here’s Explore, only in Mario Paint Composer (made by someone more talented than I am, to be sure). That’ll give you a basic idea of how it worked (the tool in the video is much more powerful than the original SNES version, though).

Unfortunately, such cutting-edge hardware still resulted in a rather limited musical palette. Cat noises, Yoshi sounds, and the baby (!) can only take a track so far, I’m afraid.