For those who are unfamiliar with the game, Yoshi’s Cookie was a puzzle game released for the NES and Gameboy (and later on, SNES) where the player is presented with a grid of cookies and has to rearrange lines in order to match cookies and clear the board before it overflows. Its something you may have played it either on one of it’s original consoles or on the Virtual Console on the Wii, and on the whole it’s a fun if fairly unremarkable game. But what is remarkable is that it has a received a virtually unknown semi-sequel that has become one of the rarest and most valuable games on the SNES.

Yoshi no Cookie: Kuruppon Oven de Cookie was released only in Japan and was only available as a promotional prize to anyone who purchased a Kuruppon Oven from a company called National Human Electronics (really just another arm of Panasonic). A free videogame with the purchase of an oven was a werid promotion, and the people of Japan seemed to agree since only around 500 people claimed their prize. This, of course, makes the game incredibly hard to find in 2014*.

Surprisingly, Kuruppon Oven de Cookie isn’t just a reskinned version of Yoshi’s Cookie with the National Human Electronics logo attached; its an expanded version of the game with content not found anywhere else. This version of the game features a world map that Yoshi can wander around in order to find ingredients that can be used to bake a Piranha Plant flavored cookie. Players can also find actual recipes throughout the world that teach them how to make real life versions of the cookies from the game (presumably in their brand new Kuruppon Ovens).

Yoshi no Cookie: Kuruppon Oven de Cookie is a one of a kind game and an interesting piece of gaming history. It’s one of the the few examples of Nintendo-sanctioned advergaming and it certainly has a very strange story behind it. It’s probably not worth tracking down since, when you get right down to it, it’s just Yoshi’s Cookie with some added recipes and a superfluous world map, but the story behind the game is why I’m glad it exists.

* I want to say that it’s rarity also makes the game incredibly expensive, but truth be told I can’t find a single record of it being sold. But I did manage to find a picture of the game with a price sticker of 157,000 yen (roughly $1500 USD), but it may not have sold at that price. Still, it’s probably really expensive.