Nobody has ever pretended that Balloon Fight was an original idea. It takes the flying duel of Williams’ Joust and swaps the knight on an ostrich for a small man hanging under two balloons, and the British press saw it at once: “For Balloon Fight read Joust Mk2,” wrote Computer and Video Games in 1988. What Nintendo added was a feel of its own, a scrolling bonus mode called Balloon Trip, and some unusually smooth movement. That came from a young programmer at an outside company, Satoru Iwata, who later became Nintendo’s president, and his method ended up in Super Mario Bros..
Fast facts
- Maker: Nintendo. It was the first Famicom game from Nintendo R&D1, Gunpei Yokoi’s department, and Yoshio Sakamoto worked on it.
- Programming: the arcade version by Toshihiko Nakago’s team at SRD; the Famicom version by HAL Laboratory, where Iwata was the programmer.
- Released: arcades in 1984, on Nintendo’s Vs. System; Famicom in January 1985; later on the NES in America and Europe.
- Players: one or two at once, as a team or against each other.
- Modes: Balloon Fight, and Balloon Trip in the home version.
One game, two programs
In 1984 Nintendo had an arcade board, the Vs. System, built from the same chips as the Famicom, so a game could be made for both. Balloon Fight was. Toshihiko Nakago’s team at SRD, a programming company that worked for Nintendo, made the arcade version, and HAL Laboratory made the Famicom one.
The home version moved more smoothly, and Nakago wanted to know why. In 2009 he and Iwata remembered the conversation for Nintendo’s Iwata Asks interviews. “That’s when I told Nakago-san everything I knew,” Iwata said. “One thing I recommended was that instead of calculating the character’s position using integers, they should also calculate it using decimal points, thereby doubling the precision.” Keeping a fraction of a pixel lets a character speed up and slow down gradually instead of jumping between whole-pixel speeds. Nakago carried the idea into Super Mario Bros.: “The reason why Mario moves so smoothly in the underwater stages is thanks to the guidance I was given by you.” Shigeru Miyamoto, Nakago added, complained: “Why do you have to go to another company to find this stuff out?”
The credit for the Famicom program is Iwata’s. Yoshio Sakamoto, who called Balloon Fight his second video game, told his audience at the Game Developers Conference in 2010 that “the programmer of this game was, remarkably, Satoru Iwata”. Wireframe’s history of HAL also names Balloon Fight among the Famicom games Iwata programmed there, with Golf, Pinball and F-1 Race. It was not his first go at the idea: in 1983 he had written a Famicom Joust for a deal with Atari that fell through, as the Joust entry describes.
How it plays
The player’s fighter carries two balloons and flaps his arms to rise. Every screen has platforms and a set of enemies floating on balloons of their own. Burst an enemy’s balloon by coming down on it from above, and it drifts to earth, where it has to be hit again to finish it off; do both in one move, Computer and Video Games noted, “and there are extra points to be had”. The fighter has “a strong inertial roll to his movements so timing is all”. Lose one balloon and, as Retro Gamer put it, it becomes harder to gain height; lose both and the life is over.
The screens have their own dangers: lightning bolts, and, on screens with water at the bottom, “a sneaky but very cute fish that leaps up and grabs you if you fly too low”. Every so often a bonus round sends balloons rising from pipes along the bottom of the screen, to be caught for points. Two players can work together or compete.
Balloon Trip
The Famicom and NES version added Balloon Trip, a single-player mode that the arcade game did not have. The screen scrolls sideways, and the player floats along collecting balloons and avoiding the lightning for as long as possible. Computer and Video Games called it “really GROO-VY”. It later became a Game & Watch of its own: the Balloon Fight handheld of 1986 was based on Balloon Trip, with a jet-pack for the hero, according to Retro Gamer.
“For Balloon Fight read Joust”
The comparison with Joust started inside Nintendo. Asked in 2000 about how Mario Bros. began, Miyamoto described Joust as “a famous American game”, adding: “I think it was kind of similar to Balloon Fight.” The reviewers said the same thing, more bluntly:
- Computer and Video Games, February 1988: “Balloon Fight owes a debt to possibly the looniest game ever dreamt up - Joust by Williams.” It also saw “more than a touch of Pooyan” in the hero’s balloons. The graphics were “nothing special” and the sound “merely adequate”, but “the game delivers in its FEEL”.
- ACE, January 1989, in a mail-order list of NES cartridges: “A cute version of the old arcade game, Joust. Simplistic, addictive fun.”
- Nintendo Magazine System’s game index, from 1992: “Boasting gameplay similar to the classic Joust arcade game”. Even with simultaneous two-player action, the reviewer found that it grew dull very quickly, and scored it 74%.
- Retro Gamer, reviewing the Wii re-release in 2007: “essentially the same game”, but with “that typical Nintendo touch”.
Later releases
Hudson Soft converted Balloon Fight for Japanese home computers such as the NEC PC-88 and the Sharp X1, according to Wireframe. Nintendo reissued it in Japan in May 2004 as part of its Famicom Mini series for the Game Boy Advance, and sold it for the Wii’s Virtual Console in 2007, where Retro Gamer called it “an absolute steal” at 500 points. It was also one of the games Nintendo gave to early buyers of the 3DS after cutting that console’s price.
The game had few direct successors. Retro Gamer counted two, one of them a spin-off. That one was Tingle’s Balloon Fight for the Nintendo DS, which put the Zelda character Tingle into the game, added a mode with 99 screens and let up to four players compete wirelessly; it was only released in Japan, to members of Club Nintendo. The Game Boy’s Balloon Kid (1990) sent a child with two balloons through a side-scrolling world. The balloon-popping idea itself turned up elsewhere, Retro Gamer noted, in Super Mario Kart and Mario Party.
Sources
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Volume 2, part 1, “It All Began In 1984” (2009, web): the Vs. System; SRD’s arcade version and HAL’s Famicom version; the decimal positions; Mario’s swimming; Miyamoto’s complaint; release dates in the footnotes. https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Iwata-Asks/Iwata-Asks-New-Super-Mario-Bros-Wii/Volume-2/1-It-All-Began-In-1984/1-It-All-Began-In-1984-232825.html
- Nintendo, Yoshio Sakamoto’s Game Developers Conference 2010 lecture, Japanese transcript, part 2 (quotation translated): Balloon Fight as his second game and Iwata as its programmer. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/wii/interview/slsjr3oj/vol1/index_gdc2.html
- Nintendo Dream, interview with four Famicom Disk System developers, September 2004 (Japanese; republished on Nintendo DREAM WEB, 21 February 2023): Balloon Fight as R&D1’s first Famicom game, as set out in the Nintendo R&D1 entry. https://www.ndw.jp/disksystem-interview-230221/
- Wireframe issue 17, June 2019, p. 50, HAL Laboratory profile: Golf, Pinball, Balloon Fight and F-1 Race “all programmed by Iwata at HAL”.
- Wireframe issue 53, July 2021, Hudson Soft profile: Hudson’s conversions of Balloon Fight and Mario Bros. for the PC-88 and Sharp X1.
- Wireframe issue 44, October 2020, Nintendo 3DS profile: Balloon Fight among the games given to early adopters after the price cut.
- Shigeru Miyamoto, interview in Game Maestro volume 1 (2000), translated by shmuplations (web, secondary): Joust and Balloon Fight. https://shmuplations.com/miyamoto2000/
- Computer and Video Games issue 76, February 1988, “Mean Machines” section: review of the NES version (Joust, Pooyan, the inertia, the fish and lightning, team or competition play, the bonus round, Balloon Trip).
- ACE issue 16, January 1989: mail-order advertisement listing Balloon Fight at £24.
- Nintendo Magazine System issues 1–5, October 1992 to February 1993: game index entry (74%).
- Retro Gamer issue 42, 2007, p. 94: review of the Virtual Console release (500 points, “essentially the same game”).
- Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008, Game & Watch “Retroinspection”: the Balloon Fight handheld (1986 Crystal Screen, 1988 New Wide Screen) and Balloon Trip appearing only in the home version.
- Retro Gamer issue 106, September 2012: Tingle’s Balloon Fight.
- Retro Gamer issue 110, January 2013, “Nintendo Legends”: the Vs. System debut in 1984, the two modes, one balloon left, Sakamoto, two sequels, Mario Party and Super Mario Kart.
- Edge issue 137, June 2004: the second Famicom Mini series, including Balloon Fight, on sale in Japan in May 2004.
- Club Nintendo (Germany), December 1990: Balloon Kid for the Game Boy.
- The Joust entry: Iwata’s unreleased Famicom Joust of 1983.