Mario & Yoshi: The Dinosaur's Quiet Handheld Debut

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Yoshi is one of Nintendo's most beloved characters, a green dinosaur with a bottomless appetite and a starring role in dozens of games. But everyone has a beginning, and one of Yoshi's earliest leading parts was not a lush platformer at all. It was a modest falling-block puzzle on the Game Boy, in which the little dinosaur does not run or jump but simply hatches, over and over, from matched eggshells. It is a charming and slightly odd debut, and a reminder that even mascots start small.

Made by the studio that would soon invent Pokemon.

One game, several names

The game is a small case study in how confusing Nintendo's regional naming could be. In Japan it was known by a name that translates roughly to Yoshi's Egg, in Europe it went out as Mario & Yoshi, and in the United States it was simply called Yoshi. Three territories, three titles, one game. Whatever the label on the box, it arrived in the early 1990s, not long after Yoshi had first appeared as Mario's dinosaur steed in the Mario platformers, and it was one of the first times the character got his name on a cover of his own.

Juggling stacks and hatching eggs

The playfield is split into columns, and pieces drop from the top: familiar Mario enemies like Goombas and shells, along with the top and bottom halves of Yoshi's eggs. Mario stands at the bottom holding two stacks, and you shuffle the columns left and right so that matching pieces land on one another. Stack a bottom eggshell and a top eggshell together, with monsters sandwiched in between, and the egg hatches into Yoshi, clearing everything and scoring you points. The bigger the sandwich, the bigger the Yoshi, and the greater the reward.

It is a lighter, more forgiving puzzle than something like Dr. Mario, built around timing and tidy stacking rather than fiendish colour logic. That gentleness is part of its charm. It is the kind of game you play in a queue or on a short journey, chasing a slightly better score each time, with a friendly dinosaur popping into existence whenever you get it right.

Match the eggshells, hatch the dinosaur.

Made by a studio you now know well

There is a lovely footnote here. The game was developed not by Nintendo itself but by a small outside studio: Game Freak, the very team that, a few years later, would create Pokemon and change the fortunes of the Game Boy forever. Long before they were building a world of pocket monsters, they were making tidy little puzzle games like this one, learning their craft on the same grey handheld. Held up against what came next, this modest cartridge looks like an early sketch by an artist who would soon paint something enormous.

Yoshi would go on to headline far grander adventures, but there is something endearing about seeing him here at the very start, hatching quietly from a puzzle on a two-inch screen. You can find Mario & Yoshi in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.