it’s so weird how the SNES mouse just kinda looks like that, right?
it’s not even necessarily for anything like, bad about the design or anything. no, it’s very aesthetically pleasing, enjoy it a lot, but moreso just because like. the specific structure of the two buttons being very literally just, rectangles, that don’t engulf the entire mouse, is very obviously a hold-over from what were at the time, contemporary computer mice of the late 80s and early 90s and whatnot. just because those would be the most recognizable “computer mouse” to people at the time.
mario paint released in 1992, but was likely in development before that. in 1992 itself, you could find a few computer mice that did actually have the mouse buttons effectively engulf a quarter of the mouse like they do now, but odds are, mario paint was actually developed more with a computer mouse more in line with something like this in mind:
a lot of early computer mice from before stuff like infrared becoming a widespread technology or y2k aesthetics were made popular and then just kinda low-key indirectly changed mouse architecture forever looked a bit like this. slight (and in some cases like the image above, we mean slight) curvature on what’s closer to a rectangular prism than a ovular dome, with rectangular buttons, usually two but three was also a surprisingly common number.
and like, it’s kinda funny that we think nowadays, more people are likely to have more experience with an SNES mouse than one of these older computer mice, pretty much because of how easy the SNES mouse is to use over those things. unlike the various hardware backwards compatibility nightmares that you have to jump through just to try to use an older mouse from the 80s on a modern PC, the SNES mouse was just made to work on an SNES.
and so now there’s just this famous computer mouse for the SNES, boldly carrying the knowledge of what 80s computer mouse technology used to be like into the minds of people even today, as people learn about mario paint and whatnot and learn the SNES mouse was a real thing. people out there still enthusiastic about the thing and even making things to use a SNES mouse (and its oft forgotten sibling, the famicom keyboard) on an actual, real, modern day computer, and we’d wager some people just don’t even know why the SNES mouse looks like that after all this time.
and i dunno, we just think that’s kind of neat. that’s why we made a post about it.
