Yoshi's Island - Development

Development

The game uses the Super FX 2 microchip to create sprite scaling, polygon effects, and pre-32-bit computer effects called "Morphmation" (in American commercials) that are relatively advanced for a SNES game (a preliminary version of the boxart featured the Super FX 2 logo). The game's unique graphical style is said to have resulted from a conflict with Nintendo's internal evaluation committee; impressed by the recently released Donkey Kong Country, which sported pre-rendered graphics, they ordered the game's producer, Shigeru Miyamoto, to move the visuals in this direction. Miyamoto altered the graphics to look as if they had been drawn with crayons and felt-pens, making them more cartoonish, and resubmitted it to the evaluation committee, who passed the game. Some of the cut scenes do, however, show pre-rendered graphics, done in a rather different form that looks more like the gameplay graphics. Eventually the sequel, Yoshi's Story made full use of digitized 2D graphics of high resolution 3D models like Donkey Kong Country did.