Illustration by Alex Castro
If you go to YouTube and search “Mario Paint Composer” you’ll be treated to a variety of quirky remixed music. Some of the best tracks sound as if the original song was put through a chiptune music filter and uploaded, staying incredibly faithful to their source material. Mario Paint remixes, however, are not simply chiptune remixes. Composers have to deal with an unusual set of tools, including weird limits on notes and tempos, barking 16-bit dogs, and more in order to create their music. It’s a challenge to create music with these strange rules in place, but the challenge is what brings these composers to the medium in the first place.
“It started out way back in 2013,” CyanSMP64 tells The Verge. Cyan is one Mario Paint composer behind…