Yoshi's Cookie

Yoshi's Cookie is a tile-matching video game in which the player is given a playing field populated with cookies of several types, arranged in a rectangular grid. The main objective of each level is to clear the playing field of all the cookies. The player mixes and matches the cookies such that entire rows or columns consist only of cookies of the same type. The player controls a cursor on the grid that is used to rotate individual lines in a manner similar to a Rubik's Cube.

When a single row or column contains all matching cookies, the row is cleared from the grid. The grid grows in size from cookies entering from the top and right sides of the playing field and a game over occurs when the grid overflows. A sixth cookie type, shaped like Yoshi's head, occasionally appears that acts as a wild card, used to help clear lines of any other cookie.

Yoshi's Cookie originally began development as an arcade game called Hermetica (ヘルメティカ, Herumetika), which was being produced by game developer Home Data. The arcade game did poorly at the location test, so Home Data sold the Hermetica rights to Bullet-Proof Software. Bullet-Proof Software then produced an SNES version, designed by David Nolte. This version was shown at the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show.

Nintendo obtained the licenses for the 8-bit (NES and Game Boy) versions of Hermetica, and developed the game into Yoshi's Cookie, which now featured Mario characters. The soundtrack was composed by Akira Satou, Nobuya Ikuta, Noriko Nishizaka, and Tsutomu, which also features a rendition of Csikós Post, written by German composer Hermann Necke.

From contemporary reviews, the four reviewers in Weekly Famicom Tsūshin commented positively on the Famicom version of the game with one reviewer saying it was similarly addictive as single player gamer like Dr. Mario while another said it was not as strong as addictive as Tetris. The reviewers found it most fun as a two-player game with the ability to cause disruptions to the other player. Reviewing the version for the Game Boy, the reviewers said the cookies were harder to decipher on the Game Boy screen, but it was superior to the Famicom version as a multiplayer game as it allowed up to four players and the fact that players could not see each other's screens made it more intense.

The Washington Post in 1993 called the game "simple, but addictive, just like all puzzlers from the Big N. Give Yoshi's Cookie a taste test - but don't do it before bedtime. You might have nightmares about that NES coming back to life."