Blaster Master | Code Like It's 198x

Nintendo Power told the story as a fairy tale: “This is the story of a boy named Jason and his frog Fred.” Fred hops out of his bowl, lands on a box marked “Danger—Radioactive”, grows “larger and larger until he became a huge monster frog”, and vanishes into the earth. Jason jumps into the pit after him and finds, instead of his frog, an armoured vehicle built to fight “the evil Plutonium Boss and his band of radioactive mutants”. The premise was silly. The game that Sunsoft built underneath it was not: a large, connected underground world, explored partly in a tank that drives and jumps along side-on caverns and partly on foot through overhead mazes, where the way forward depends on the upgrades already won.

Fast facts

Developer and publisher: Sunsoft. Music by Naoki Kodaka.
NES: North America, 1988; Europe, 1991.
Japan: Chō Wakusei Senki Metafight, Famicom, June 1988, with a different story.
Structure: eight stages, joined into one map; a boss at the end of each.
Two views: side-on in the vehicle, overhead on foot.
Sequels: Blaster Master Boy (Game Boy), Blaster Master 2 (Mega Drive), Blaster Master: Enemy Below (Game Boy) and Blasting Again (PlayStation), and Inti Creates’ Blaster Master Zero (2017) and its sequels.

Two games in one

Most of the time the player drives. The screen scrolls in every direction through caverns, lava-filled passages and water, and the vehicle uses “powerful springs to jump over enemies”, and fires a laser cannon that can be powered up. It can also carry special weapons found along the way: a Homing Missile that “seeks out nearby enemies, even if they are hiding”, the Thunder Break, which can hit “a mutant attacking from below”, and a Multi-Warhead Missile that fires three at a time.

Jason can climb out at any moment and walk, which is slower and riskier but gets him through gaps the vehicle cannot. Doors in the side-on stages lead into the mutants’ bases, and inside them the view changes to overhead. “Inside the mutant bases you can no longer jump,” Nintendo Power explained. “Instead, you have grenades that pack a wallop!” Here the guardians wait: the first is a “bloated brain” surrounded by orbiting cells, which Nintendo Power advised defeating “with grenade power”, and Britain’s Total! agreed: “don’t bother using your normal gun”.

A map that opens up

Beating a guardian earns an upgrade, most of them for the vehicle. Nintendo Power listed them in its second feature: Hyper, which “adds magnum force to your cannon”; Crusher, which gives it “the force of a battering ram” for breaking walls; Hover, to “hang in the air”; a Key for the locked doors in Stage 5; Dive, which in water “is better than webbed feet”; and two Wall options, the first to climb vertical surfaces and the second to “cruise upside down”.

These abilities are the game’s structure. “Notice that there is no direct route from Stage 1 through to the end,” Nintendo Power warned. “Many doors will open only after you have moved on and defeated more difficult stages.” The door to Stage 7, for example, sits back in Stage 2, and only a vehicle with Wall 1 from Stage 6 can reach it. “Remember to go back and check dead-ends,” the magazine advised. “The second time you may find that things have changed for the better.”

Metafight

In Japan Sunsoft had released the game in June 1988 as Chō Wakusei Senki Metafight, with a science-fiction war story about a pilot and a combat tank defending a distant planet. For America, Sunsoft replaced it with Jason and Fred. One name survived the change: “Sophia the 3rd”, the planet in Metafight, became the name of Jason’s vehicle in Blaster Master.

Reception

The game came to Britain more than two years later, and the reviews were warm but not ecstatic. Mean Machines in March 1992 thought the “size, challenge, variety and enjoyability of the game should keep you involved for ages”, and called it “a great title which, although it offers nothing stunningly new, is a lot of fun to play and represents great value for money”. Total! was cooler. It liked the “nice big end-of-level bosses and a more interesting map structure than most games of this kind (sometimes you have to retrace your steps through previously-completed bits of the level)”, but found the game “slow-paced and unexciting” overall and complained about one thing above all: “Without passcodes, you have to finish it all in one go!”

Sequels and remakes

Sunsoft kept the name going. Blaster Master Boy for the Game Boy, reviewed by Nintendo Power in February 1992, was a different kind of game, and one of the magazine’s reviewers, a self-declared “real fan of Blaster Master for the NES”, complained that “there’s none of the sense of exploring a big world like there was in the original and no cool vehicle either”. Blaster Master 2 followed on Sega’s Mega Drive in 1993. Blaster Master: Enemy Below for the Game Boy was in British shops by the summer of 2000, and Blaster Master: Blasting Again for the PlayStation by early 2001.

The series’ revival came from outside Sunsoft. The Japanese developer Inti Creates licensed Blaster Master from Sunsoft and released Blaster Master Zero for the Nintendo Switch and 3DS on 9 March 2017, a remake with new bosses and areas that kept the side-on driving and the overhead sections on foot. The studio followed it with Blaster Master Zero 2 and 3.

Sources

Nintendo Power issue 2, September/October 1988, p. 74: Blaster Master feature (the story of Jason and Fred, the Plutonium Boss, the eight stages, the vehicle and its weapons); p. 88: among the games on sale.
Nintendo Power issue 3, November/December 1988, pp. 26–34: Blaster Master part 2 (the box of leaking plutonium, the overhead bases and grenades, the guardians, the Hyper, Crusher, Hover, Key, Dive, Wall 1 and Wall 2 options, the map with “no direct route”, the advice on dead ends).
“List of NES music composers”, NESdev Wiki (web, secondary): Naoki Kodaka’s credit for Blaster Master. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/List_of_NES_music_composers
Mean Machines issue 18, March 1992, pp. 94–96: NES review.
Total! issue 6, June 1992, pp. 34–35: NES review.
Nintendo Power issue 33, February 1992: Blaster Master Boy review. Issue 39, August 1992, p. 59: Sunsoft’s plans for a sequel.
Sega Visions, April 1993: Blaster Master 2 in Sega’s list of Genesis action games.
Planet Game Boy issue 4, June 2000: Blaster Master: Enemy Below (Game Boy). Official New Zealand PlayStation Magazine issue 41, January 2001: Blaster Master: Blasting Again (PlayStation).
“Blaster Master (video game)”, Wikipedia (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): the Japanese title and release date of 17 June 1988, the European release in 1991, the Metafight story and the planet name that became the vehicle’s, citing the Japanese instruction manual and Justin Potts, “Interview with the Creator of Blaster Master”, LevelFortyTwo, 29 June 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Master_(video_game)
Sexy隊長, “『ブラスターマスターゼロ』はサイドビューとトップビューの探索ACTを楽しめる”, Dengeki Online, 6 August 2019 (web, in Japanese): Blaster Master as the international title of Chō Wakusei Senki Metafight; Blaster Master Zero as Inti Creates’ licensed remake. https://dengekionline.com/articles/8043/
Inti Creates, Blaster Master Zero page (web, secondary): the licence from Sunsoft, the release date of 9 March 2017, Switch and 3DS, the new bosses and areas. https://inticreates.com/?p=6081
“Blaster Master”, Wikipedia (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): Blaster Master Zero 2 (2019) and Blaster Master Zero 3 (2021). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_Master
Damien McFerran, “Blaster Master Zero lays waste to Switch and 3DS on March 9th”, Nintendo Life, 28 February 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/02/blaster_master_zero_lays_waste_to_switch_and_3ds_on_march_9th