Yoshi

Yoshi is a falling block game in which the player is given a playing field that is divided into four columns. The objective is to match Yoshi egg shells to hatch them and prevent the four stacks, which pile up from the falling monsters, from growing too tall. The player character, Mario, swaps the stacks around such that the falling monsters will be eliminated by coming into contact with the blocks they match.

Monsters, which consist of various Mario enemies, appear at the top of the screen and fall into each column, turning into blocks as they land and creating stacks that incrementally grow in height. The main objective is to prevent the four stacks from growing too high by eliminating blocks from the field; a game over occurs when any of the stacks cross the black line drawn across the top of the play field. A stack can hold up to eight objects in the NES version or seven in the Game Boy version.

Yoshi was the first collaboration between developer Game Freak and publisher Nintendo. Nintendo had previously passed on publishing Game Freak's first title, Mendel Palace for the NES. After the smaller company incorporated and began work on its second release, Smart Ball for the SNES, Nintendo made Game Freak the offer to develop Yoshi. It was suggested by Tsunekazu Ishihara, an associate of Game Freak co-founder Satoshi Tajiri, that they develop smaller games like Yoshi in order to give the company the financial backing to eventually realize its larger-scale project, the RPG series Pokémon.

Yoshi was developed in six months with Tajiri as its director. Ken Sugimori came up with the gameplay concept. Ishihara and Yoshi creator Shigeru Miyamoto served as producers. Tajiri explained that it was during the development of Yoshi that he learned the "wave" design of game difficulty in which the player is presented with an easy stage directly after a challenging one to allow them to savor their accomplishment.

Yoshi sold 500,000 copies in Japan on its first day on sale. In the United States, the game topped Babbage's NES sales charts for two months in 1992, from August to September. In the United Kingdom, the Game Boy version still sold 100,000 copies in 1997, years after release.

Upon release, the game received a positive review from the Europress gaming magazine N-Force, which stated in a preview for the game in its September 1992 issue that "basically [the game] is great. The fun of Tetris, but with colour and sound effects. Just as hard, maybe harder – definitely just as addictive." It later rated the game 4 out of 5 in the Buyers' Guide for its January 1993 issue, summarizing that "Yoshi is great fun.