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Those of you currently in gainful employment which involves sitting behind a desk for most of your waking day will surely concur that staring endlessly at spreadsheets and graphs gets boring real quick. Thankfully, a solution may yet be at hand to resolve your workplace funk - and it involves Nintendo's famous mascot Mario, albeit in a totally unofficial capacity.

The work of Aaron Randall, Screentendo is a Mac-based application which takes a screenshot of your monitor and turns it into a Super Mario Bros. level.

Here's Randall himself explaining the development process:

The idea came from a conversation with a friend at work - he spends a bunch of his time staring at graphs which monitor our servers, and I joked with him that one day I'd build an app that he could overlay on those graphs to turn them into something more interesting to look at (while still maintaining their use as graphs).

A few weeks later we had a hackday at the Songkick office where I work (a hackday is where everyone spends the day working on anything they like), and I cobbled something together that eventually became 'Screentendo'.

It's Mac-only at the moment, but Randall is keen to develop it for other platforms:

I'd love to release a compiled version of the app at some point, but there's plenty of work to do to get to that point.

The image processing step is pretty slow at the moment, so for larger images it can take a long time to convert the image into a playable level. Also the game physics is quite clunky.

When I fix these, I'd love to look at porting to other platforms.

As with anything that features Mario without Nintendo's permission, we imagine that Screentendo - should it receive any additional development - will need to change its lead character at some point. Still, it's a really cool idea and one that illustrates how inventive developers can be when given the chance.

[source bbc.co.uk]