Yoshi Sample: The One-Level Showpiece Packed Into the GBA Dev Kit
Not every Nintendo game was made to be sold. Yoshi Sample, also known as the Yoshi Demo, was a small program that Nintendo supplied to developers with its Game Boy Advance development hardware. Its job was to demonstrate what the new handheld could do: a greater range of colours than the Game Boy Color and improved sprite transformation, meaning sprites that can be rotated and scaled.
It is a short taste of Yoshi's Story, not a full game. After a rotating view of Yoshi's Island, you drop into a single level that scrolls in every direction and loops endlessly. Yoshi can walk, jump, flutter jump and ground-pound. Eggs act as health, and a falling or hit Yoshi loses petals from his Smile Meter, as in the Nintendo 64 original.
At a glance
- Based on: Yoshi's Story (Nintendo 64), loosely
- Created by: Nintendo
- Released: never as a product; shown from 2000 and distributed with GBA development kits
- Genre: Platformer tech demo
- What sets it apart: an official first look at the GBA's visual capabilities
Two versions
The first version of the demo is silent, because it uses no audio assets. A second version adds music and sound effects. This cartridge carries the SDK 3.0 build.
Why it is remembered
The demo is often called vaporware, since nobody outside Nintendo knows whether it was ever meant to become a full game. Fan sites trace its first public showing to April 2000, and IGN published photos of a dev kit running it in December 2001. That article also described Yoshi eating enemies to make eggs, which the screenshots do not support.