Games inside games: Gnat Attack (Mario Paint)

Take a break from making art to splat bugs with a fly swatter.

This column is “Games inside games,” in which I’ll write about game contained within — and only contained within — another game. No secret playable Wolfenstein inside of a different Wolfenstein here, but original games exclusive to the games they’re contained within. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Game

Mario Paint released on the Super Nintendo in 1992, in Japan, North America, and Europe. Its genre is listed as “Art tool,” since the primary point of Mario Paint was to, well, paint. But also to make music using its compositional tool, do some drawing with non-painting artistic tools, and so on. It was a classic all-ages experience that utilized the Super NES Mouse peripheral, which did not get nearly enough attention from developers if we can be honest with ourselves for a moment. Maybe it would have had more if the SNES also had a Super NES Keyboard peripheral — that would have made DOOM for the SNES a whole lot different to control, huh? Or if, say, SimCity had been given full mouse functionality, a great game would have felt even better. But hey, at least we got Mario Paint, and Japan, at least, got Mario & Wario.

Mario Paint was something a couple million people poured a surprising amount of time into back in the early 90s, in spite of the increased price for the game and peripheral bundle. And there are still people who spend a lot of time in Mario Paint today! The last decade-plus has featured a music scene that utilizes Mario Paint’s composition tool to make covers and original songs, and its influence in later creation tools of Nintendo’s is fairly obvious: there’s no Super Mario Maker without Mario Paint initially flexing these muscles, and even it being a place for future designers of WarioWare titles is apparent. Composer Hirokazu “Chip” Tanaka very clearly saw it as a playground for eclectic sounds that hadn’t been heard in an SNES game to that point, and that experience and boldness was then used extensively in later Tanaka works like the legendary EarthBound soundtrack. Even if you aren’t a Mario Paint fan yourself, it’s got quite the legacy for a title that sold just a couple million units over 30 years ago on a system with games that did far, far better than that.

The Game Inside The Game

Painting and drawing and composing isn’t all you can do in Mario Paint. You can also swat bugs. Lots of bugs. “What did those bugs ever do to you,” you might ask, “thanks to climate issues bugs are in peril and we need those bugs or else we’re doomed, too.” Listen I’m not sure what part of the ecosystem “bugs that look like Bob-ombs that chase any living thing they see and then attempt to explode on them” belong to but it doesn’t seem like one that needs to continue to be maintained. At least mosquitoes serve as a food source for other creatures. Also Gnat Attack isn’t real, it can’t hurt you.

Gnat Attack isn’t exclusive to Mario Paint, but that was the case with it for decades. It also appeared as a microgame in WarioWare, Inc.: Mega MicroGame$!, WarioWare D.I.Y., and WarioWare Gold, and in the first of those, was also a bonus minigame. It also appears in Super Mario Maker, but only the Wii U version: ever notice those flies that occasionally pop up on screen while you’re crafting a level? That’s a bread crumb trail for you to follow. Or swat, really.

How To Get Gnat Attack

Gnat Attack isn’t actually called that anywhere you can see within Mario Paint, as it’s represented by a little piece of art of a hot drink in a mug with heat lines rising from it found on the scrolling menu underneath your canvas. A coffee break, a tea break, whatever you’re into, that’s what it represents. All you have to do is mouse over and click, and you’re there. You can do that from the start, without having to play X number of hours of Mario Paint or draw Y number of drawings or whatever. Just play Gnat Attack exclusively, if that’s what you want to do, it’s your leisure time.

It takes a little more work to get it in the other games it appears in, as mentioned above: you have to successfully touch three flies in a row with the stylus in Super Mario Maker to be brought to the minigame, and in Mega MicroGame$!, you need a score of at least 25 in Remix #1 to unlock it to play whenever you feel like. For some reason, it was never placed as an unlockable minigame in future WarioWare titles, and isn’t included in Super Mario Maker on the 3DS nor the Switch sequel, either. At least with the Switch sequel you can argue that it’s only touchscreen-enabled when undocked, but the 3DS had a stylus just like the Wii U, so that one is more of a headscratcher.

It’s a little surprising, along the same lines, that Gnat Attack didn’t receive a DSiWare release, especially when Nintendo bothered to put a different WarioWare minigame, Bird & Beans, on that storefront at a low price, with some beefed up bits to boot. We’re way past hoping that happens, though, considering the DSiWare was quite a few handhelds ago, and you can’t even legally access the games that were released for that service anymore.

What is Gnat Attack?

Gnat Attack is a three-stage, single-screen action game where you swat various types of flies to keep them from stinging you into oblivion. You must swat 100 flies in each level in order to make the boss reveal itself, and then that giant boss bug must be swatted 20 times in order to be defeated. It’s all easier said than done, as Gnat Attack starts out easy enough, but the pacing of it ramps up as you go, and you’ll start to understand why you’re getting so many extra lives when it feels like you don’t need them before too long.

The basic Fly enemy doesn’t hurt you, but they still need to be swatted, and are essentially the heralds of the bugs that will hurt you, repeatedly. The Big Fly will buzz around until left alone long enough to fire off a four-way blast of orb projectiles that will cost you a life if you come into contact with any of them. The Fly Parent is a yellow hornet? wasp? that, if left alone for too long, will fire off a wave of Fly Children, which are basically a line of homing rounds. These bugs will also fly after the glove instead of just kind of doing their own thing, so you need to watch out for their flight patterns to avoid losing a life before they even perform their most dangerous attack. Then there are the aforementioned Fly Bombs, which, yeah, look like someone slapped bug wings on a Bob-omb. These will activate when they near the glove hand, and will explode on their own if you don’t defeat them yourself — the only enemy type to do that — but you don’t want them to explode, either, since the explosions can hurt you if you’re too close to the blast.

Lastly, there’s King Watinga, who takes up a significant chunk of screen real estate all on his own, and has more menacing versions of attacks you see the other bugs deploy. A much larger wave of projectiles is fired from Watinga, and while you’ve got time to dodge them, eventually, they’re paired with much larger waves of homing Fly Children that also move in a nebulous cloud shape instead of a straight homing line that can be easy to mislead and avoid. Dodging one in this scenario can lead you to crashing into the other, and that’s without even bringing up that Watinga moves faster in each new encounter, and in a way that attempts to catch you up in some contact, whether with his large body or his little rocket propulsion accelerator that’s apparently organic to this thing. The fewer questions you ask about the anatomy of this guy, the better.

The game is three levels long, but when you complete a loop, you’re brought back to the start to face the same three levels again, only this time they feature faster and more aggressive enemies. So even if you can get through the initial three stages in a hurry, the real challenge is in racking up completed loops, which are represented by a star in the top-left corner of your screen. There’s no score to speak of, so those completed loops are the measure by which you gauge your success. How long can you play before you finally run out of lives?

Gnat Attack is a real simple game. It requires some reflexes for the tougher levels and speeds, sure, but it’s point and click, a game that only requires one hand and one button. The reason it works so well is twofold: it just feels snappy and good and satisfying to play, so the ease of use of it all is its own reward, and it sounds incredible. The bugs all have these little sound effects that change depending on the level, and they’re weird in precisely the kind of way anyone familiar with the version of Nintendo that decides to get weird like this (WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven, etc.) knows without me even sharing. The music, too, is just fantastic. It’s all good, but the first stage music is a shining example of “they didn’t have to go so hard but they did.”

All of that effort in creating an exceptionally catchy toe-tapper for a minigame that’s buried within a menu, that people might not even bother to play because it isn’t the drawing or painting or composing part of the game that promised those things and just included swatting flies as a little palate-cleansing bonus. Palette-cleansing bonus? Either way. And if you can’t already hear the version of Tanaka that would co-compose EarthBound from Gnat Attack 1, well then let me introduce you to Gnat Attack 2:

I’m going to pretend you’re still not convinced so Gnat Attack 3 gets embedded, too:

The music isn’t the only reason to play or revisit Gnat Attack, but hearing it sure doesn’t hurt.

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