Yoshi's Cookie

About Yoshi's Cookie

Yoshi's Cookie (1992) is Nintendo's NES and Game Boy tile-matching puzzle game in which rows and columns of cookies are rotated like a Rubik's Cube, adapted from an arcade game that failed its location test.

Yoshi's Cookie in Depth

The playing field is a rectangular grid of several kinds of cookie, and the aim of each level is to clear it. The player moves a cursor to rotate individual rows and columns, in a manner similar to a Rubik's Cube, and whenever an entire row or column consists of one type of cookie it is cleared from the grid. New cookies keep entering from the top and right, and the game ends if the grid overflows. A sixth kind of cookie, shaped like Yoshi's head, occasionally appears as a wild card that helps clear a line of any other type.

In the single-player Action Mode, the levels grow steadily more complex. A VS Mode lets two players compete in split screen, and the Game Boy version allows up to four players, who cannot see each other's screens. The later SNES version adds a single-player VS Mode against the computer and a Puzzle Mode, in which each level starts from a set grid that must be cleared within a maximum number of moves.

Making Yoshi's Cookie

Home Data sold the rights to Hermetica to Bullet-Proof Software, whose SNES version, designed by David Nolte, was shown at the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show. Nintendo licensed the 8-bit versions and, with Tose developing, turned the game into Yoshi's Cookie with Mario characters; Bullet-Proof kept its SNES game but was allowed to use the Mario characters and the Yoshi's Cookie name. The NES and Game Boy versions came out in Japan on 21 November 1992 and in North America in April 1993, with the SNES version that June.

Famicom Tsūshin's reviewers called it addictive, though not as much as Tetris, and most fun with two players. The Washington Post called it "simple, but addictive, just like all puzzlers from the Big N", and Nintendo Power rated it the fifth best NES game of 1993. It was remade for the GameCube's Nintendo Puzzle Collection in 2003, and IGN later ranked it 50th among SNES games.