The first Bomberman was a one-player game with one kind of bomb and one kind of enemy. Edge, visiting Hudson Soft in 1995, reported that it had been written in 1980 “purely as an exercise to demonstrate the power of Hudson’s own BASIC compiler”, and only later had a small release as a computer game. British Spectrum owners met it in 1984 under a different name, Eric and the Floaters, and CRASH gave it 60%. What turned that modest maze game into one of the best-known party games of the 1990s was a piece of hardware: a multitap that let five joypads plug into NEC’s PC Engine.
Fast facts
- Developer: Hudson Soft of Sapporo.
- First version: 1983, for Japanese home computers; published in Britain by Sinclair in 1984 as Eric and the Floaters. Wireframe credits the programmer Yuji Tanaka.
- Famicom version: December 1985, with power-ups.
- Multiplayer: five players on the PC Engine with its multitap, four on the Super Nintendo’s Super Bomberman (1993), ten on Saturn Bomberman (1996).
- Owner today: Konami, which merged Hudson into Konami Digital Entertainment on 1 March 2012.
Eric and the Floaters
Sinclair Research published two Hudson games for the 48K Spectrum in 1984, at £5.95 each. In Eric and the Floaters the player’s man is trapped in an underground maze “beneath the rubble of the Brick Lane”, where creatures called Floaters drift about and kill him if they touch him. He lays bombs that go off “about two and a half seconds” later, blasting away walls and, with luck, Floaters. When a Floater got angry and turned red, it hunted Eric down instead of drifting.
CRASH’s reviewers liked the idea. “The idea of leaving bombs behind you to explode when you’re safely round a corner, and hopefully the floater isn’t, is quite original, and makes for a different maze game,” one wrote. The game was let down by its controls, with keys laid out in “a left hand and right hand cross” and, on a joystick, a response so slow that it “led to many Eric deaths by being blown up with his own bombs”. It got 60% overall.
The Famicom game
Hudson was one of the first outside companies licensed to make games for Nintendo’s Famicom, and after hits such as Lode Runner and Star Force it went back through its old computer games looking for its next one. Edge told what happened next. “After seeing power-up systems in popular shoot ’em ups of the day, the game’s designers incorporated a similar concept into Bomberman — bombs could be increased in strength by collecting icons.” That made the bomb a thing to manage: icons hidden under breakable blocks added range or an extra bomb, so a player’s explosions grew as the game went on.
Bomberman came out on the Famicom in December 1985, and in North America on the NES in 1989. It was a game for one player. By the middle of the decade, Wireframe reports, Hudson’s Famicom versions of Bomberman and Lode Runner had each sold over a million copies. Nakamoto never lost his affection for it. “I personally believe that the Famicom version of Bomberman is the one and only version of the game,” he told Edge.
Five players and more
Even the NES sequel, Bomberman II, took no more than three players. Hudson had helped design the chips inside NEC’s PC Engine, and the PC Engine had a multitap. “We were really lucky that the PC Engine had a multitap,” Nakamoto said. “Without it, the PC Engine version would have been merely a reproduction, and would probably soon have been forgotten.” Edge called the multitap “arguably the single most important factor in Bomberman’s success”. It made the game a party game, in which, as Amiga Power put it, players spent most of their time “setting traps to blow the other players up”.
The PC Engine game reached Europe on Amiga as Dyna Blaster, published by Ubi Soft in 1992. Amiga Power explained that it “started out on the PC Engine under the name Bomberman” and was at its best in five-player mode, although “putting number five onto the keyboard in the middle can cause problems”. On the Super Nintendo, Super Bomberman (1993) gave up to four players a battle mode with a dozen arenas, using Hudson’s own Super Multitap. Super Play recommended having “three or four people playing it at once”, and Super Bomberman 3 (1995) was the first in that series to take five. Hudson’s Hi-Ten Bomberman, built for its 1993 touring Caravan events, ran on an early high-definition television and took ten players, and Edge called it “arguably the best multiplayer game in the world”. Saturn Bomberman (1996) brought ten-player games home.
Under Konami
Konami bought into Hudson from 2001 and absorbed it in 2012. It kept the character: Super Bomberman R revived the series in 2017. The Hudson Soft entry tells the company’s story.
Sources
- CRASH issue 6, July 1984, p. 54: Eric and the Floaters review (Sinclair, author Hudson Soft, 48K, £5.95; the Floaters; bombs after “about two and a half seconds”; the reviewers’ comments; 60%).
- Edge issue 17, February 1995, pp. 46–48, feature on Hudson Soft: Shinichi Nakamoto as director of R&D; The Bomber Man “written in 1980” as a demonstration of Hudson’s BASIC compiler and its small release as a one-player computer game; the Famicom revival and power-ups; the multitap; Hi-Ten Bomberman; Super Bomberman 3 as the first five-player game in the SNES series; “the one and only version of the game”.
- Rik Cross, “Recreate Bomberman’s iconic explosives”, Wireframe issue 12, April 2019, p. 32: “first released in the early 1980s as a tech demo for a BASIC compiler”.
- Wireframe issue 53, July 2021, pp. 84–89, “Developer Profile: Hudson Soft”: Bomberman in 1983 and Yuji Tanaka; Eric and the Floaters; the Famicom versions of Bomberman and Lode Runner selling over a million copies each.
- Amiga Power issue 12, April 1992, p. 76: Dyna Blaster review (Ubi Soft, £30.99, author Hudson Soft; the PC Engine original; the five-player mode; “setting traps”).
- Super Play issue 9, July 1993, pp. 38–39: Super Bomberman review (four players with the Super Multitap; the Battle Game’s twelve arenas; Dynablaster and the PC Engine game).
- Nintendo Power issue 45, February 1993, p. 86: Bomberman II for the NES, with a two- and three-player option.
- Computer and Video Games issue 189, August 1997, p. 74: Saturn Bomberman’s ten-player mode, as cited in the Hudson Soft entry.
- The Hudson Soft entry and its sources: Hudson as an early Famicom licensee; its work on the PC Engine’s chips; the Caravan; Konami’s shareholding and the merger of 1 March 2012; Super Bomberman R (2017).
- Wikipedia, “Bomberman (1985 video game)” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): Famicom release in December 1985 and North American NES release in January 1989; a one-player game; power-ups hidden in blocks that increase blast range and the number of bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomberman_(1985_video_game)