THE MAKING OF: YOSHI’S ISLAND

T

here’s an enormous burden of

expectation that comes with

following up a game like Super

Mario World. Retro Gamer readers

voted it the greatest game of all time, and many

would argue that it was as close as you could

get to a perfect game, as it built admirably on

the already refined Mario platform formula

while adding the benefits of 16-bit technology. It

would be very hard to elaborate on the formula,

especially given that delays to the Ultra 64 project

meant that Nintendo was still tied to the 16-bit

SNES. With player expectations guaranteed to

be through the roof, was there even any sense in

trying to create a traditional Mario sequel?

It turns out that Takashi Tezuka and Shigefumi

Hino didn’t think so. They were two of the

directors of Yoshi’s Island, alongside fellow

directors Toshihiko Nakago and Hideki Konno, with

Shigeru Miyamoto acting as producer. Working

together at Nintendo EAD, this team wanted to

take a different approach instead. “We felt we’d

done everything we wanted to for side-scrolling

with Super Mario World, and so wanted to try

creating a platformer with a different angle to it,”

the developers explain. “Before Yoshi’s Island,

we’d only created games with Mario as the lead

character. We felt that changing the lead character

would give us a different perspective and different

gameplay possibilities, and so we started thinking

up a game with Yoshi as the lead.”

That makes sense – but the Mushroom

Kingdom is home to many interesting characters,

many of whom have also starred in spin-offs.

What made Yoshi the character of choice over

the likes of Wario, Luigi or Peach? This goes back

to the creation of the character for Super Mario

World, as we discover. “The idea for Yoshi came

about because Mr Miyamoto wanted to have

Mario ride a horse. We thought it would be better

to have a new character rather than a horse, so Mr

Hino and I went about creating one,” Tezuka tells

us. “Yoshi turned into quite the cute character, and

we were very interested in creating some kind of

spin-off with him; that’s where it all began.”

This wasn’t Yoshi’s first starring role in a game,

of course. Mario’s trusty steed had previously

appeared headlined three games, the puzzle

games Mario & Yoshi and Yoshi’s Cookie and the

Super Scope blaster Yoshi’s Safari. But none

Tasked with delivering a successor to Super Mario World, Nintendo’s

developers decided to entrust the starring role to a new hero and

knocked it out of the park. Takashi Tezuka and Shigefumi

Hino look back on the development of Yoshi’s Island

Words by Nick Thorpe

THE MAKING OF: YOSHI’S ISLAND

THE

MAKING

OF

RETRO GAMER | 23