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Pick Up and Play, Part 3: Mario & Yoshi

Marcel Pflug

Aug 15, 2023

3 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

Some quickies wear their charm on the box, and some hide a surprise in the credits. Part three of Pick Up and Play is one of the latter: a modest, easy-to-love falling-block puzzle that happens to have been made by a small studio on the verge of changing gaming forever.

Game Boy Mario & Yoshi, the Game Freak falling-block puzzle — Stack the shells, hatch a Yoshi, chase the score.

Stack, match, hatch

In Mario & Yoshi, enemies drift down in columns and Mario stands at the bottom, shuffling them left and right onto four stacks. Match two of the same creature and they pop and vanish. The clever twist is Yoshi: catch an egg's top and bottom halves with a pile of enemies sandwiched between them, and the whole stack hatches into a Yoshi for a burst of points, with a longer sandwich hatching a bigger, more valuable one. It is simple to grasp and immediately satisfying, the kind of thing your hands learn in a single game.

There is a gentle novelty in seeing who does what here. Yoshi had only just arrived in Super Mario World, and already he was fronting his own game, while Mario, usually the star, is demoted to a supporting role at the bottom of the screen, flipping the stacks like a short-order cook turning plates. Nintendo had a habit in these years of taking a popular face and building a quick puzzle around it, and this is a charming early example, with the company's newest mascot getting top billing on the box before he had even led a platformer of his own.

As a pick-up-and-play game it ticks every box. There is no story and no ending to chase, just a rising tide of enemies and a score to beat, so a round lasts exactly as long as you want it to. Stop at any moment and you have lost nothing but a personal best, which is the gentlest stake a game can offer.

The depth is all in anticipation. Because you can shuffle the bottom stacks and see what is coming, good play is about deciding where each creature should land and, now and then, resisting an easy match to hold out for a fat egg sandwich and the bigger Yoshi it hatches. The board is small and the decisions are fast, so a single misjudged column can send the whole thing toppling, which is exactly the sort of low-stakes tension that has you muttering 'one more' under your breath.

It looks the part, too. The enemies are crisp and readable even in the Game Boy's four greens, the animation of a stack popping is instantly clear, and the little victory of a Yoshi unfurling from its shell never quite gets old. None of it is showy, but all of it is legible, which matters far more than spectacle on a screen you might be squinting at on a moving bus.

The Game Freak connection

Here is the detail that makes collectors smile. Mario & Yoshi was developed by Game Freak, the studio that just a few years later would create Pokemon and become one of the most important names in the industry. Game Freak had grown out of a self-published fanzine started by Satoshi Tajiri, and its monster-collecting idea would arrive in 1996 and go on to sell in the hundreds of millions. Seen from today, this tidy little puzzler is an early sketch by a team about to reshape handheld gaming entirely, which gives a humble score-chaser a surprising place in history. The collection also holds several of Game Freak's Pokemon titles, so the beginning and the breakthrough sit on the same shelves.

The name is a small lesson in Nintendo's regional branding, too. North America got the game simply as Yoshi, while PAL territories, including the European cartridge held here, received it as Mario & Yoshi. Same game, same swap-and-stack puzzle, two different labels depending on where you bought it.

That is the quiet pleasure of Mario & Yoshi. It asks nothing of you, remembers nothing, and judges you only by a number that resets the moment you want it to. You can hatch a single Yoshi on a coffee break and feel you got the good out of it, or chase a personal best until your thumbs ache. Either way you walk away clean, which is the whole promise of this series.

Unassuming, quick and quietly historic, it is exactly the sort of game this series exists to celebrate. To see this cartridge and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.