Listen to Toto’s ‘Africa’ Played on Mario Paint
The 1992 video game Mario Paint allowed players to create music tracks with the characters representing different musical instruments. And, sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti, someone has used it to make their own version of Toto's "Africa."
Even though the creation came to our attention only recently, after a video game-based YouTube network called Machinima posted it to its Facebook account, the track was first uploaded by Alec Britt eight years ago, when he was a senior in high school. It has since received more than 1 million views.
In the video's description, Britt revealed how he got around the limitations of Mario Paint to create the song.
"The tempo was set to 2944, which puts the tempo so high that notes will sound like they are played at the same time when placed on adjacent lines," he writes. "This is why most 'beats' have clusters of up to four or even five lines of notes. This bypasses the five-note limit of the program, as well as give me more options for volume control of each line." You can listen to it below.
"I did not use the vanilla Mario Paint sounds," Britt noted. "People more impressive than me can utilize the normal sounds in great ways, but I personally just liked the soundsets that other users ... had created. But each note was still individually placed, and each volume bar still manually adjusted. I did not import any MIDI file or cheat in any other way, I just changed the sound files each symbol played because I liked the way it sounded."