Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
1995 · Platform · SNES
Overview
Yoshi's Island was a radical visual and mechanical departure from the main Mario series. The crayon-and-watercolour art style combined with a gameplay system in which Yoshi carries Baby Mario, temporarily losing him when hit rather than dying, created a game of distinctive identity. It is the SNES game most admired for visual design.
Deep Dive
Yoshi's Island was directed by Takashi Tezuka at Nintendo EAD and used the Super FX 2 chip to achieve its hand-drawn visual aesthetic. The chip handled the sprite scaling and rotation required to display the game's animated enemies and environments with the organic irregularity of hand-drawn art. The gameplay design — in which Yoshi, not Mario, was the player character — inverted the usual relationship: Yoshi protected Mario rather than Mario being the agent.
Developer Story
Yoshi's Island was developed by Nintendo EAD under director Takashi Tezuka as both a technical showcase for the Super FX 2 chip and an artistic response to Rare's Donkey Kong Country. The game took approximately two years to develop and launched in Japan in August 1995.
Did You Know?
- Yoshi's Island was developed in response to concerns that Donkey Kong Country's pre-rendered 3D graphics would make SNES games look outdated — Nintendo responded with a deliberately hand-drawn aesthetic.
- The crying that plays when Baby Mario is separated from Yoshi was specifically designed to be annoying enough to motivate players to rescue him quickly.
- The game's final boss sequence was designed as a demonstration of the Super FX 2 chip's sprite scaling capability.
- Yoshi's Island introduced the Flutter Jump — holding the jump button to extend airtime — that became a staple of Yoshi's subsequent games.
