Yoshi's Story - Game Boy Advance Tech Demo

Game Boy Advance Tech Demo

When Nintendo first unveiled the Game Boy Advance to U.S. game developers in April 2000, one of the available demonstrations was a tech demo based on Yoshi's Story. It was specifically developed to show off the Game Boy Advance's graphical capacity, featuring an opening demo and one course. Taking advantage of the system's affine rotate-and-zoom feature (akin to the Super Nintendo's Mode 7), the opening demo would render a scene with similarity to the title screen of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, displaying a seascape in perspective, rotating about an island resembling the shape of a Yoshi. The succeeding playable course was based on the colourful cardboard theme of Yoshi's Story. However, the demo was significantly different in the aspect of gameplay. For instance, Yoshi was unable to use his tongue; nor could he throw eggs, in spite of being able to obtain them. Screenshots from the demo also show the presence of giant Shy Guys roaming the pathway; although, these were primarily designed to demonstrate system's advancement from the Game Boy Color's 10-pixel sprite limit.

Although Nintendo published a promotional image showing the Game Boy Advance with the tech demo playing, it was never released as a complete game.