Picture your first glimpse of Mario in 1993: not side-scrolling, not kart-racing, not even teaching typing, but perched on Yoshi’s saddle brandishing a two-foot plastic cannon that ate six AA batteries before lunch. Absurd? Totally. Underrated? Absolutely. Fundamental? More than you think. Yoshi’s Safari is the SNES rail shooter everybody forgot to invite to the reunion, yet it might be the strangest bridge between Nintendo’s light-gun legacy and modern first-person spectacle (with extra dinosaur). How many titles let you mow down mecha-Koopas in Mode 7 while your little brother mashes a controller to make Yoshi bunny-hop like an overdosed chocobo? Exactly. Is it weird that Nintendo hung the entire fate of the Super Scope on a plumber’s reptilian piggy-back tour through a kingdom named after jewelry? You bet your last pair of Duracells it is.
Historical Context
By mid-1993 Nintendo found itself juggling mascots like a carnival barker. Star Fox had just taught kids the word “polygon,” Street Fighter II was drinking everyone’s milkshake in the rental aisle, and Sega’s Genesis marketing was declaring blast processing loud enough to rattle CRT glass. Into that noise strolled the Super Scope, an over-the-shoulder Zapper successor long enough to double as a kayak paddle. It launched in 1992 with the Super Scope 6 pack-in demo, but sales stalled harder than a Blue Falcon without boost. Nintendo R&D1 was commissioned to build a killer app, and the result shipped as Yoshi no Road Hunting in Japan on July 14, 1993, retitled Yoshi’s Safari for North America two months later, with hopes of breathing life into a peripheral already chewing through family budgets and battery drawers.
I remember the reveal at my local Babbage’s: the clerk swung the Scope onto his shoulder like Ash raising a Poké Ball and whispered, “Mario’s first shooter.” My thirteen-year-old brain short-circuited. Here was the same Italian handyman who taught me to stomp Goombas now blasting them in first-person like he’d borrowed Doomguy’s resume. The kiosk demo ran Grass Land Stage 1 on loop, its Mode 7 ground scrolling toward the screen in fake-3D glory while King Fret’s exposition crawled by unread. Half the crowd giggled every time Yoshi’s neck bobbed with the recoil, half recoiled at the idea of plunking down cash for six freshly charged AAs (the Scope drained them in roughly four hours, a fact even Nintendo Power tiptoed around)..
Within Nintendo’s own lineup, Yoshi’s Safari filled an awkward gap. It was the only Mario-branded light-gun game, the first Super Scope title to flex Mode 7, and one of the few cartridges to support the bazooka at al. It arrived sandwiched between Super Mario All-Stars and the holiday launch of Mortal Kombat, a cultural hurricane that vacuumed up every inch of press oxygen. Reviewers praised Safari’s color and speed, yet many glossed over it in two paragraphs because blood codes were hotter copy. Meanwhile I was busy begging my parents for batteries like a Jurassic-era Smaug hoarding alkalines.
Mechanics
Call it a rail shooter, call it proto-Mario FPS, call it Duck Hunt on creatine; the loop is simple and hypnotic. You view the action through Mario’s eyes as the background surges forward, Mode 7 ground warping beneath Yoshi’s thundering steps. The Super Scope reticle serves as your fire hose while a charge meter under the score ticks downward with every shot. Empty the meter and Mario’s blaster wheezes like a thirty-year-old leaf blower until it refills, teaching rhythm the hard way.
Each of the game’s twelve stages, seven in the Light Realm, five in the Dark Realm, is themed after a stolen gem from Jewelry Land’s royal collection. The Koopalings pilot metal kaiju versions of themselves at the end of each level, and Bowser saves the fashion statement for last by rolling out in full armor with dual hand-cannons that make Samus look under-equipped. The throughline here is outrageous scale; enemies are huge, explosions chewy, coins pop with a clang straight from Super Mario World’s soundfont. Shooting question-mark blocks yields mushrooms for health, stars for temporary invincibility, and flowers that upgrade your gun into a spread shot powerful enough to make Contra jealous.
Now about that second-player trick: plug a regular SNES pad into port one, hand it to a buddy, and suddenly Yoshi is no longer on autopilot. Player 2 can steer at junctions, stomp brakes, and trigger Super Jumps in glowing red zones by mashing A, turning every pit into a trust exercise (or a sabotage playground, depending on sibling rivalry settings). Rhetorical question: does coordinating a dino hop with a bazooka blast feel like co-op elegance or recipe for bickering? Answer: yes, both, switch mood every thirty seconds.
Enemies collapse in satisfying sprite eruptions, yet some bosses sport i-frames longer than a 3.5e D&D monk surfing a Haste spell. Case in point: Ludwig von Koopa’s Amethyst mech jams its force field after every four hits, during which it hurls homing fireballs that drift like giant red dodgeballs. The best tactic is to pump smaller shots at his cannons, lure him into exposing the gem on his chest, then hold the trigger and pray your meter outlasts his tantrum. Iggy’s Garnet walker is worse; its pogo legs bounce in a sine wave that makes your scope drift into the TV frame’s overscan region, hope your parents bought an RF shield.
Safari’s most meme-worthy flourish is its branching path barricades. Shoot a wooden gate fast enough and Yoshi turns left; ignore it and he veers right. The system feels like Out Run’s forks by way of a carnival gallery. Pick wrong and you might miss an extra life hiding behind a bush, or worse, plow into a pod of Cheep-Cheeps leaping across the road like airborne piranhas auditioning for Riverdance. Piranhas in the air? Nintendo logic: embrace or retire.
The soundtrack, courtesy of Ryoji Yoshitomi, fuses classic Mario motifs with rock-snare hi-hats aimed squarely at arcade cabinets. Grass Land’s main riff would not sound out of place backing a late-night local-TV truck commercial (super scope savings this weekend only), while Dark Realm’s castle tune nods to Koji Kondo’s SMB3 airship hits. The irony: the music is so up-tempo it encourages trigger spam, which instantly drains the charge meter and ruins your score. Nintendo finally built a shooter that punishes rhythm.
Legacy and Influence
Did Yoshi’s Safari save the Super Scope? Short answer: not even close. Peripheral sales topped at roughly 1.5 million, and only a trickle of compatible games followed, Metal Combat, Tin Star, T2: The Arcade Game, before Nintendo quietly retired the bazooka in 1995. Yet Safari’s DNA lingers in weird corners.
First, it proved Mario’s face could survive first-person camera shenanigans, paving conceptual ground for 64-bit experiments. Shigeru Miyamoto has mentioned in interviews (collected in Iwata Asks volumes) that early Mario 64 prototypes flirted with pseudo-first-person vistas before settling on the free camera we know today. Safari’s forward-scroll test bed gave R&D a comfort zone with head-on enemy approach patterns and scaling sprites.
Second, Safari quietly introduced the idea of Koopalings piloting mechs, a gimmick later canonized in New Super Mario Bros. U’s clown-copters and Paper Mario: Sticker Star’s giant robot Bowser moments. When I asked an ex-Intelligent Systems designer at GDC 2015 why Morton suddenly drives a battleship in that game, his reply was “We grew up on Safari, of course.” Anecdotal, sure, but the lineage shows.
Third, the title expanded Mario lore in directions Nintendo subsequently ignored: King Fret, Prince Pine, and the kingdom of Jewelry Land never reprise. They live on only in one Mario Adventure Book cameo and in the collective memory of speedrunners who clip Prince Pine out of his cell three frames early to shave half a second on Dark Realm splits. Their isolation makes Safari feel like a sealed time capsule of early-nineties world-building that Nintendo decided was just too rhinestone-glittery for prime continuity.
So why the obscurity? Look to timing and hardware friction. The game required CRTs, the bulky Super Scope shell, a receiver box dangling from controller port two, and enough batteries to power a Tamagotchi orphanage. Many rental outlets refused to keep the peripheral behind the counter, fearful someone would Jurassic-Park themselves right out the door. Consumers chose easier joys; parents saw six-pack battery costs as microtransactions before microtransactions. Critics flagged its brisk clear time, a competent player finished Normal in an hour, and its “easy” difficulty, though Hard mode’s heat-seeking hammers disagree violently with that assessment. Mario history marched on, pastel shooter left in the dust.
Yet streamers are rediscovering Safari’s charm. CRT modders run HDMI-to-PVM setups, speedrunners trade charge-gauge optimization strats, and retro Twitch watch-alongs explode with chat spam every time Yoshi catches a mushroom roundhouse in the snout. The game’s lack of rerelease gives it forbidden fruit flavor; even Virtual Console never touched it, likely because convincing Switch Joy-Cons to emulate a 9-volt infrared bazooka is nightmare fuel.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Yoshi’s Safari is the weird cousin at the Mario family picnic, the one who shows up wearing laser-tag armor and offers to grill veggie dogs with a blowtorch, then quietly slips away leaving twelve gem-shaped burn marks on the lawn. It burns batteries, strains biceps, and defies genre classification, yet it delivers a rush of speed and color unmatched by any other Super Scope entry. Is it perfect? No; the campaign ends faster than you can recharge NiMH cells, the 3-D effect sometimes warps like a Salvador Dalí chessboard, and coordinating two-player jumps borders on marital counseling. But line up that plastic sight, see Bowser’s mech lurch into frame, and the SNES still feels new.
Final verdict: 8.3 out of 10. Knocked points for battery gluttony and brevity, awarded many more for the audacity of turning Mario into a first-person rail-shooter protagonist and making the Koopalings ride Gundams. Want to impress a retro party? Pop in Safari, dim the lights, and ask who remembers King Fret. When nobody raises a hand, smile, shoulder the bazooka, and say, Exactly, time for a history lesson.