Bubble Bobble | Code Like It's 198x

Bubble Bobble looks like a game for children and plays like a puzzle with a secret. Two small dinosaurs, Bub and Bob, blow bubbles at monsters, trap them, and burst the bubbles to turn the monsters into fruit. That takes about a minute to learn. What takes longer is the rest: 100 screens that grow steadily more devious, bubbles that drift on invisible air currents, hidden doors that open only for players who never lose a life, and an ending that tells a lone player they have not really finished. The designer, Fukio Mitsuji, said it plainly: “In this game, you had to play cooperatively in order to reach the true ending.”

It gave Taito its first worldwide in-house hit since Space Invaders, in Retro Gamer’s judgement, and in Britain it gave Firebird its first big coin-op licence. When Computer & Video Games found it in the arcades in the autumn of 1986, it noted that the game “is totally lacking in violence but is just as addictive”.

Fast facts

Designer: Fukio Mitsuji, at Taito.
Arcade release: 1986.
Players: one or two at once; a second player can join at any time.
Screens: 100 single, non-scrolling screens, with a boss on the last.
Endings: more than one; the happy ending needs two players to finish together.
Home conversions: Software Creations for Firebird on the Spectrum and Commodore 64 (1987), with Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga versions from Firebird; Taito’s own versions for the NES and Master System.
Reviews: CRASH 90% (Spectrum, October 1987); ZZAP!64 97% and a Gold Medal (C64, October 1987).
Sequels: Rainbow Islands (1987), Parasol Stars (1991), the spin-off Puzzle Bobble (1994) and many more.

Designing for two

Mitsuji had made a racing game and a shooting game before it. “Now I thought I’d try my hand at a comical game!” he told the Japanese magazine BEEP! in 1988. His “first, most basic development concept was to make a game that girls could enjoy”. He wrote a list of more than 100 ideas and whittled it down, and bubbles won because bursting them fitted his idea of “pleasure” gameplay. The heroes came later. “My first idea was robots that had a spike on top of their heads,” he said, “but they didn’t look cool at all”, and looking for another creature with spikes led him to dinosaurs. Code the Classics adds that he wanted a game couples would play together, at a time when women were rarely seen in Japanese arcades. Several of the game’s monsters had already appeared in Taito’s Chack’n Pop (1983).

The story is told in one line on the opening screen and not much more. ZZAP!64 summed it up as “a strange and surreal adventure through 100 caves” in search of the dinosaurs’ girlfriends, kidnapped by Baron von Blubba.

How it plays

A bubble shoots a short way forward, then floats upward, and any monster in its path is trapped inside. Jump into the bubble, or touch it with a spiky back or head, and it bursts; the monster spins off the screen and lands as fruit or another bonus. Leave a trapped monster too long and it breaks out “all red and angry”, as ZZAP!64 put it, and faster than before. Take too long over a whole screen and Baron von Blubba appears, an indestructible pursuer, to hurry the players along.

The game hides most of its depth in rules it never explains. Stephen Ruddy, who converted it to the Commodore 64, described what he found when he took it apart. Each bubble has a lifetime for catching a monster and another for existing at all, and a bubble that catches nothing becomes a “float bubble” that drifts with the airflow set for each part of the screen, up, down, left or right. Special bubbles release water, fire or lightning. Bubbles carrying letters spell E-X-T-E-N-D for an extra life. Bursting trapped monsters together pays far more than bursting them one by one: Retro Gamer counted 64,000 points for all seven at once. And the bonus items are not random. The fruit on each screen depends on how quickly the previous one was cleared, and the power-ups follow what Ruddy called “a complex rule set”.

Secret doors and endings

Firebird’s own games player, Adrian Curry, gave Amiga Computing’s readers an advanced player’s guide in 1988. Survive to the 20th screen without losing a life and a door appears; go through it and the players reach a treasure room, with a coded message written on the wall, worth pausing the game to decipher. Survive another ten screens and another door appears, up to four times, the last being a teleport. Retro Gamer later gave the details: treasure rooms on rounds 20, 30 and 40, and on round 50 a door that warps the players forward 20 screens towards the showdown on round 100. The coded messages are hints.

Finishing round 100 alone does not end the game. Retro Gamer explained in 2004 that a single player who clears it is told they have not reached the true ending and is sent back to have another go. Two players who finish together see the “happy ending”, in which Bub and Bob meet their girlfriends, and are given a code. Entered on the title screen, it starts “Super Bubble Bobble”, with the monsters swapped around to make it harder. Finish that with both players alive and the last secret comes out: the boss the brothers have just beaten was their own parents, under someone else’s control. Code the Classics describes the same arrangement, and the lone player’s ending telling them not to forget their friend.

The Firebird conversions

Firebird announced the licence in the autumn of 1987. Your Sinclair called it “the company’s first big coin-op licence, this one from Taito”, and reported the promise that all 100 screens would be crammed in. Software Creations of Manchester did the work. On the Spectrum, Sinclair User credited Mike Follin with the conversion and his brother Tim Follin with the music. Firebird’s advertisement priced it at £7.95 on the Spectrum, £8.95 on Commodore 64 and Amstrad cassette, £12.95 on C64 disk, £14.95 on Amstrad disc and £19.95 for the Atari ST. Before release, ACE announced that its second issue would give Commodore and Spectrum owners the first five levels on a cover cassette.

Ruddy’s Commodore 64 version had to be learnt from the arcade machine. He told Retro Gamer in 2007 that Software Creations “actually got sent some design documents. In Japanese with no translation”, and Code the Classics describes the team playing the game over and over to work out its rules; that book also says Taito shared its source code with the converters, commented in Japanese. The arcade machine’s joystick moved only left and right, with separate buttons to jump and to blow, so on the C64 pushing up became jump. The bubbles were the hardest part. Because they bunch together in one part of the screen, a sprite multiplexer did not suit them, and Ruddy drew them as software sprites instead. The players and monsters updated on a raster interrupt every two frames, the bubbles every three in the main loop. Memory ran out near the end, and the tune for completing the game was cut. After Mike Follin saw Super Bubble Bobble in an arcade, Ruddy added an introduction screen that switched the game into that mode with a key press, and put the lost tune there. The arcade’s multiple endings were left out, “simply because we weren’t aware of them”.

The reviews were among the best either magazine gave that year. CRASH gave the Spectrum version 90% in October 1987: “the most playable arcade conversion this year”, with “no clash visible anywhere”. One reviewer said the continuous tune on the 128K version “matches the frantic action of the game”; Sinclair User found it a tune “you’ll enjoy for about two minutes, and then turn off in exasperation. Very clever it is, but also incredibly infuriating.” ZZAP!64 made the C64 version a Gold Medal at 97%, calling it “a rare and beautiful occasion when a great arcade machine is perfectly converted”, and noted that “all the features of the 100 screen arcade game have been included”, with the jolly tune “exactly like the arcade game’s”. The Amstrad version reached Amstrad Action in March 1988; its reviewer thought it had been a while coming but “certainly been worth the wait”, though its beeps were enough to make players turn the sound off.

Everywhere else

Taito made its own console versions. Nintendo Power covered the NES game, marked as a trademark of Taito America, in 1988. Taito also coded the Master System version, the only home version that Code the Classics considers accurate “to a large degree”; it holds both Bubble Bobble and Super Bubble Bobble. Retro Gamer listed conversions for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, PC, Game Boy, MSX, NES, Master System, Saturn and PlayStation. The black-and-white Game Boy version, for one player only, kept the graphics full size and scrolled each level instead, so the player could see only part of it at a time.

According to Retro Gamer in 2004, Taito had announced “a few years back” that it had lost the source code of the arcade game, so later versions were based on a disassembly of the arcade ROM.

Sequels

Code the Classics says Mitsuji was adamant that he would never make a direct sequel, and his next game went in another direction. Rainbow Islands (1987) brought Bub and Bob back in human form, gave them rainbows instead of bubbles, and scrolled up the screen. Its home versions were converted by Graftgold for Firebird’s owner, Telecomsoft, and released by Ocean in 1990; the Taito entry tells that story. Parasol Stars never appeared in arcades at all. It came out on the PC Engine in 1991, and Ocean published it for the Amiga in 1992. Retro Gamer found it “much closer to Bubble Bobble in playing style than it is to Rainbow Islands”. Taito went on with an arcade Bubble Bobble 2, known as Bubble Symphony, and turned the characters into the stars of the puzzle game Puzzle Bobble (1994), sold in the West as Bust-a-Move.

The titles tangled so badly that Retro Gamer‘s Stuart Campbell opened a survey of the series in 2006 by asking which game was the real sequel, noting that Rainbow Islands’ British box called it Bubble Bobble 2. “Rarely can a series ever have been in such need of a continuity wrangler,” he wrote.

Later years

Mitsuji died on 11 December 2008, aged 48. Wireframe called him “arguably Taito’s most talented – and oft-overlooked – designer of the eighties arcade era”; his later games included Volfied, a sequel to Qix. The original game has kept being re-released and studied. It was in the early line-up of the Taito Legends collection that Edge previewed in 2005, the year Square Enix agreed to buy Taito. In 2019 Code the Classics used it as the model for Cavern, a platform game written in Python, with Ruddy explaining how the original worked, and in 2020 Wireframe reported on Paul Hammond’s version squeezed onto the PICO-8 fantasy console; Hammond had first played the game on a Commodore 64.

Sources

Computer & Video Games issue 61, November 1986, p. 123: Arcade Action, Bubble Bobble (“totally lacking in violence but … just as addictive”, EXTEND).
Fukio Mitsuji, interview in BEEP!, 1988, translated by Shmuplations (web, secondary): his earlier racing and shooting games, a game “that girls could enjoy”, the list of over 100 ideas, bubbles, robots and dinosaurs. https://shmuplations.com/bubblebobble/
Eben Upton and others, Code the Classics, vol. 1 (Raspberry Pi Press, 2019), pp. 47–58: Mitsuji on the true ending; couples and female players; Bub, Bob and Baron von Blubba; Stephen Ruddy on the C64 conversion (bubble lifetimes, airflow, “hurry up” monsters, bonus rules, controls, the endings left out); the Master System version coded by Taito; the source code shared with converters; no direct sequel; Mitsuji’s death in 2008 aged 48; Cavern.
Retro Gamer issue 45, 2007, feature on Taito’s F series, as cited in the Taito entry: Bubble Bobble as Taito’s first worldwide in-house success since Space Invaders.
Retro Gamer issue 8, 2004, pp. 36–39, feature on Bubble Bobble: release in 1986; scoring (64,000 for seven monsters); treasure rooms on rounds 20, 30 and 40 and the warp on round 50; the single-player, happy and true endings and Super Bubble Bobble; the home conversions, the Master System and Game Boy versions; the lost source code; Chack’n Pop; Parasol Stars.
Retro Gamer issue 100, March 2012, p. 114: the final screens and the parents’ ending.
Amiga Computing vol. 1 no. 2, July 1988, p. 47: Adrian Curry of Firebird, advanced player’s guide (the secret doors, the teleport, “designed as a two player game”).
ZZAP!64 issue 30, October 1987, pp. 5, 12–13: Bubble Bobble (Firebird, £8.95), Gold Medal, 97%.
CRASH issue 45, October 1987, pp. 132–133: Bubble Bobble (Firebird, £7.95, Software Creations), 90%.
Sinclair User issue 68, November 1987, p. 50: Bubble Bobble review and programmer credits (Mike Follin, Tim Follin).
Your Sinclair issue 22, October 1987: preview (Firebird’s first big coin-op licence, Software Creations, all 100 screens). Your Sinclair issue 23, November 1987: Firebird advertisement with prices.
ACE issue 1, October 1987: news of the Bubble Bobble cover cassette in issue 2.
Amstrad Action issue 30, March 1988, pp. 56–57: Amstrad CPC review.
Retro Gamer issue 37, 2007, pp. 84–88, Paul Drury, “Ste Ruddy”: the Japanese design documents, software sprites, the update rates, memory, the Super Bubble Bobble screen.
Nintendo Power issue 3, November/December 1988: NES Bubble Bobble (“TM of Taito America Corporation”).
Mean Machines issue 4, January 1991, p. 28: Master System tips (Bubble Bobble and Super Bubble Bobble).
Retro Gamer issue 28, 2006, pp. 58–68, Stuart Campbell, “The Definitive Bubble Bobble”: the tangle of sequels, the “continuity wrangler”, Parasol Stars never in arcades, Bubble Bobble 2 as Bubble Symphony.
Wireframe issue 29, December 2019, pp. 52–53: Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands, Volfied and Puzzle Bobble; Mitsuji as “arguably Taito’s most talented” designer.
Computer & Video Games issue 116, July 1991, p. 74: PC Engine chart with Parasol Stars (Taito). Amiga Power issue 12, April 1992: Ocean’s Amiga Parasol Stars, review and competition.
ACE issue 30, March 1990: Ocean and the Rainbow Islands conversions, as cited in the Taito entry.
Edge issue 154, October 2005, p. 107: Taito Legends early line-up.
Wireframe issue 40, June 2020, pp. 78–80: Paul Hammond’s PICO-8 Bubble Bobble, and his first encounter with the C64 version.
“Fukio Mitsuji”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): date of death, 11 December 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukio_Mitsuji