In late 1995, the rebirth of videogames was almost complete. Sony’s PlayStation was already on shelves and under televisions in the UK, remoulding Mario Kart’s tartrazine fizz into the gunmetal-grey designer drug of Wipeout before amazed, dilated eyes. The 26th issue of Edge proclaimed that month’s future of electronic entertainment to be ‘3D world beater’ Fade To Black, and while that name would largely be forgotten, the moody humanity of the cover image and the cinematic ambition of the game were right on the money.

Meanwhile, in Kyoto, Shigeru Miyamoto’s internal teams at Nintendo were at the very height of their powers. Their SNES work had been an unbroken hot streak, five years long and littered with masterpieces all the way back to Super Mario World. Now they were elbow-deep in revolution themselves, months away from completing what would be their most dizzying feat: simultaneously entering and setting the seal on the brave new three-dimensional world, with fateful perfection, in Super Mario 64.

But with every beginning comes an ending, and Nintendo wasn’t about to drop the curtain without fanfare on an era it had ruled. Development of Mario 64 had overlapped with another Mario sequel in EAD’s labs, and it was the other that bore the title Super Mario World 2. It was the other that would be the last great Nintendo game on the SNES, the last great 2D platform game, and arguably the last great game of its generation. Videogames were growing up, but not before Nintendo had wound the clock back one last time, dumped its greatest star in nappies, and delivered its soulful, comic eulogy for their infancy: Yoshi’s Island.



The spellbinding intro takes us back into a world in which Mario and Luigi aren’t just babies, they aren’t even born yet: they’ve been stolen from a stork and separated before reaching their parents (and who, before this game, had ever entertained the idea of Ma and Pa Mario?). But the route Nintendo took to this gaming prehistory wasn’t the open nostalgia and quaint retrospection the company is so fond of today. A year earlier, Rare had begun Donkey Kong Country by cranking a tinny 8bit tune out of a gramophone, before swatting the past aside and brashly announcing its modernity with hip-hop beats and dazzling prerendered sprites that seemed strangely out of place on the 16bit hardware. Yoshi’s Island, however, looked neither back at earlier gaming technology, nor forward to any kind of conventional future for it. Though it (almost literally) stretched the SNES to breaking point, it tried its hardest not to look like technology at all.

The Nintendo logo that introduces it is a wobbling scribble in pencil. A soft lullaby tinkles over the clockwork grinding of a music box that, cutely, has to be rewound halfway through the intro. The sunrise that blushes behind the flapping stork is so delicate it seems to have been done in watercolours, and the characters in this storybook drama might be from, well, a storybook. This carries convincingly through into the game proper, as Yoshi bears the infant Mario to his abducted brother through worlds that seem to have been conjured out of crayon and chalk, patchwork, paper and clay. The sprites look more like hand-drawn illustrations lined in thick ink. Yoshi’s Island is a living, organic cartoon, made not of pixels or polygons, but of playroom detritus that has a texture so convincing you want to reach into the screen and touch it. The game’s graphics aren’t screaming ‘now’ but rather suggesting ‘then’: a pre-technological past, a daydreaming childhood, a story that begins ‘a long, long time ago…’



This was a major step in a radical art style for games, an alternative goal to realism: the use of serious technical firepower to create the impression of something handmade. The thick outlines foreshadowed the primary technique in the development of 3D cel-shading, and the deliberately simplistic background dioramas were a precursor to the cardboard cutouts of pseudo-2D styles like Viewtiful Joe’s. It was an approach Nintendo would experiment with time and again with results as different (and stunning) as Wind Waker, Paper Mario, and even some of Wario Ware’s scrapbook schizophrenia. It was profoundly influential, and though at the time it lacked the immediate wow factor of the super-shiny Donkey Kong Country, it has aged far more gracefully.

These homespun visual stylings weren’t the only task to which Miyamoto harnessed his artists’ talents and his programmers’ by-now-total command of the SNES. For Yoshi’s Island was a technological marvel, making extravagant use of the Super FX chip in its cart. From the rippling logo to the ballooning bosses, absolutely everything in the game scales, spins, squashes, distorts, distends and warps. Jump on a rotund, blushing creature called a Milde and it squeezes flat for a moment before popping, satisfyingly, into nothingness, sending nearby enemies tumbling with the force of the blast. Much bigger monsters made of translucent goo bounce, stretch, twist and quiver, furrowing their bushy eyebrows. Giant blocks of wood fall out of the screen, beams rotate, drums roll and boulders trundle with heavy momentum. The eggs Yoshi lays and throws ricochet like bullets, burrowing through soft earth, spinning pulleys to heft convincing weights for the little dinosaur to scamper underneath.

Mario games had for a long time been built around inertia and rebound, a strong physicality at the root of that peerless connection between player and avatar. But Yoshi’s Island was, and is, on another level. Its whole world is as tactile and elastic as a warm lump of Plasticine, as energetic as a rubber ball, as startlingly three-dimensional as a pop-up book. It is gloriously, intoxicatingly physical. And it’s not just in the lavish effects, or the surprisingly convincing physics. Tiny details of sound and animation – splattering mud, snow brushed off trees, the fat pop of a laid egg, the frantic, feather-scattering flap of a Goonie trying to support Yoshi’s weight – are just as vital in helping this playground paradise defy its well-worn idiom of lava and ice to become tangible, responsive and real.