Rainbow Islands | Code Like It's 198x

Rainbow Islands is the sequel that threw away almost everything its predecessor did. Bubble Bobble was 100 single screens of dinosaurs trapping monsters in bubbles; Rainbow Islands turns Bub and Bob back into boys, hands them rainbows instead of bubbles, and sends them climbing up tall, scrolling islands while the sea rises beneath them. Taito released it in the arcades in 1987, subtitled “The Story of Bubble Bobble 2”. Its home conversions have a story of their own: Graftgold finished them for Firebird in 1989, the magazines reviewed them, and then they vanished for six months because nobody had the right to sell them.

Fast facts

Designer: Fukio Mitsuji, at Taito, following Bubble Bobble.
Arcade release: 1987.
Players: one or two.
Structure: seven islands of four rounds each, with a boss at the top of every island, and three secret islands beyond them.
Home conversions: by Graftgold, first announced by Firebird (1989), released by Ocean (1990) for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga. Taito made its own, different, NES and Master System game.
Reviews: ACE 934 of 1000 (Atari ST, September 1989); ZZAP! 92% (C64 and Amiga, September 1989); CRASH 94% (Spectrum, April 1990); Amiga Format 95% (Amiga, May 1990).
Sequel: Parasol Stars (1991), which never appeared in arcades.

Rainbows

The player fires a rainbow in an arc in front of them. A monster caught in the arc dies. The rainbow then stays put for a while as a bridge, and the player can walk along it to reach a higher platform. Jump on it from above and it breaks and falls, crushing whatever is underneath. As Wireframe described the rules, rainbows kill enemies when they are created or when they fall on them, and a rainbow is destroyed “when the player character jumps over it, or after a certain time from its creation”. The one mechanism does the work of a gun, a ladder and a bomb.

Dead monsters turn into fruit, cakes and flowers for points, and every third one into a magic item. Amiga Format‘s Andy Smith listed the running shoes that speed the hero up and the potion bottles that double, then triple, the rainbows’ reach. ZZAP! discovered that these gifts were not random: the game keeps a running tally of kills and deaths, and “the computer can automatically make your game simpler if you are continually being killed”. The programmer told the magazine that the way the rainbows arc onto the screen “took him ages to get right”.

Climbing the islands

Each island starts at the bottom of a tall, vertically scrolling stage, and the job is to reach the top. CRASH described the first, Insect Island, full of flies, ladybirds, crows and beetles. ACE named the bosses of the first three islands: a giant spider, a helicopter and “a bat-spewing Dracula”. Taking too long brings a “Hurry up!” warning, then the monsters turn red and speed up, and then, in Amiga Format’s words, “water rises from the bottom of the screen to drown you when it covers your head.”

Like Bubble Bobble, the game hides a great deal. Some dead monsters leave coloured diamonds, and the colour depends on where on the screen the monster died, red at the far left through to violet at the far right. Collect all seven on one island, in rainbow order, and a secret room opens at the end. Amiga Format gave its readers that tip and warned that there was much more: “warps to find, secret rooms, extra bonuses and a whole heap of sub-games”. Retro Gamer later pointed out that the game raids Taito’s back catalogue: one of the seven islands is themed on Arkanoid, and the three secret islands are based on Darius, The Fairyland Story and Bubble Bobble. There are two endings.

The arcade game’s main tune was a version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. CRASH heard it on the Spectrum. It did not last: Taito’s American NES release replaced it with a sound-alike, and when Rainbow Islands was re-released in the Taito Legends compilation in 2005, Retro Gamer noted that the main theme had been rearranged because Taito had lost the rights to the original.

The conversion nobody could sell

Telecomsoft, the British Telecom software house that owned Firebird, gave the job of converting the game to Graftgold, the team led by Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook. Braybrook wrote in his diary that the work ran from September 1988 to the end of June 1989. According to Turner, Braybrook “masterminded” the conversion, using Dominic Robinson’s 16-bit engine, while David O’Connor programmed the Spectrum version and Gary Foreman the Commodore 64 one; Retro Gamer credited John Cumming with the Amiga graphics.

Braybrook’s diary shows how close to the hardware it ran. Rainbows were drawn with a “cell system” of characters placed over the background, which saved the Amiga redrawing them every frame. Late in the summer of 1989 the Amiga version was “officially tested at Commodore’s Hall of Fame, where they have one of every version of the Amiga ever available”. Some of those machines’ Gary chips did not allow the “blitter-friendly mode” Braybrook had relied on, and Graftgold had to find a new way of drawing its moving objects.

The reviews came first. ACE gave the Atari ST version 934 in September 1989 under the headline “Firebird find Graftgold at the end of the rainbow”. Memory had forced Graftgold to leave out the three secret islands, it reported, but both animated endings were there, and “Steve Turner, Andy Braybrook and company can congratulate themselves on this fine conversion”, “nearly identical to the coin-op in almost every department”. The same month ZZAP! reviewed the Commodore 64 and Amiga versions, priced at £9.99 on cassette and £19.99 on the Amiga, and scored them 92%: “like having the coin-op in your own bedroom!” In November ACE was still listing it as a Firebird/MicroProse game.

Then the game failed to appear. Telecomsoft had been sold to MicroProse, and MicroProse’s deal with Taito fell through. In March 1990 ACE reported that Ocean had signed its own agreement with Taito for the home computer rights and bought Graftgold’s code from MicroProse “for an ‘undisclosed sum’ rumoured to be in the region of £50,000”, with the conversions due out that month.

Ocean’s release

When the game did arrive, it was received as though the wait had been worth it. CRASH gave the Spectrum version 94% in April 1990, at £9.99 on cassette. One reviewer found that “Colour oozes out of every corner of the game, and you never notice any clash at all” and wondered whether it was really the Spectrum; the other admitted, “I really can’t drag myself away from this game to write the review”. The one complaint was that the tune slowed down when the screen filled with monsters. Amstrad Action warned readers not to play it in front of younger brothers and sisters, “or your CPC won’t be yours much longer!” Amiga Format gave the Amiga version, at £24.99, 95%: “This is a classic game from the Super Mario Bros school of games design that will have you glued to the monitor for a very long time.”

Commodore put it in the box. Its new Amiga 500 bundle, the “Flight of Fantasy” pack at £399.99, came with Rainbow Islands, F29 Retaliator, Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters and Deluxe Paint II. A year later, when Amiga Power launched with a panel’s list of the 100 best Amiga games, Rainbow Islands was number one.

Other versions

Taito’s own 8-bit console game, sold for the NES and the Master System, has the same subtitle but, as Retro Gamer’s Stuart Campbell explained, “is in fact a completely different game”: six of its seven islands follow the arcade themes, but the levels are new, and the player can have only two rainbows at once. Ocean released a separate NES version in Europe, closer to the arcade game. Taito also made Rainbow Islands Extra (1988), an arcade revision that keeps the levels but shuffles the monsters so that tough ones from later islands appear early; its only home versions were for the Japanese FM Towns computer and the Mega Drive, which also included the original game. A PC Engine CD version from NEC Avenue reached Edge in its first issue in October 1993, described as “one of the most delayed games of all time”; it scored seven out of ten.

The story continued in Parasol Stars (1991), which kept Bub and Bob human, swapped rainbows for parasols and appeared only on home formats; the Bubble Bobble entry tells that part.

Later years

Graftgold converted the game a second time in 1996, for a PlayStation, Saturn and PC release in which Bubble Bobble got top billing. Retro Gamer called this Rainbow Islands Enhanced a “tasteful update”, but noted that it was based on the Amiga version and still lacked the three secret islands. The arcade original returned in the Taito Legends collection in 2005. Rising Star Games then published new versions: Rainbow Islands Evolution for the PSP and Rainbow Islands Revolution for the Nintendo DS. The DS game had players draw shapes on the touch screen instead of jumping, and Retro Gamer found that “It may look and sound (well, sort of sound) similar to the 1987 original but that’s as far as the comparisons go.”

The game still turns up as a model for programmers. In 2021 Wireframe used it as the basis of a tutorial for writing a vertically scrolling platform game in Python.

Sources

ACE issue 24, September 1989, pp. 62–63: “Firebird find Graftgold at the end of the rainbow”, Atari ST review by Eugene Lacey (ACE rating 934; seven islands of four levels; the spider, helicopter and Dracula; the secret islands left out; both endings kept; the five credits).
ZZAP! issue 53, September 1989, p. 10: Rainbow Islands (Firebird, C64 £9.99 cassette, £12.99 disk; Amiga £19.99), 92%; the statistics that decide the special items; the rainbow arc.
ACE issue 26, November 1989: “Title fight” ratings table listing Rainbow Islands as Firebird/MicroProse.
Andrew Braybrook, “From Start to Finish: The Diary of a Game”, Amiga Action issue 4, January 1990: Rainbow Islands for Telecomsoft from September 1988 to the end of June 1989; the cell system; testing at Commodore’s Hall of Fame and the Gary chips.
ACE issue 30, March 1990: MicroProse’s deal with Taito falls through; Ocean’s agreement with Taito and purchase of Graftgold’s code (rumoured £50,000); the ST version’s 934 rating.
CRASH issue 75, April 1990, pp. 44–45: Spectrum review (Ocean/Graftgold, £9.99 cassette, £14.99 disk), 94%; Insect Island; “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.
Amstrad Action issue 55, April 1990, p. 54: Amstrad CPC review.
Amiga Format issue 10, May 1990, pp. 36–37: Amiga review by Andy Smith (Ocean, £24.99), 95%; magic items, diamonds and the secret room, rising water.
Amiga Format issue 10, May 1990, news: Commodore’s A500 “Flight of Fantasy” bundle and its contents. ACE issue 33, June 1990: the same bundle at £399.99.
Amiga Power issue zero, May 1991, free with Amiga Format issue 22: the All-Time Top 100, with Rainbow Islands at number one.
Edge issue 1, October 1993, p. 101: PC Engine CD version (NEC Avenue), seven out of ten.
Steve Turner, “Graftgold” profile, Retro Gamer issue 8, 2004: the conversion, the programmers, MicroProse and Ocean. Same issue, p. 39: Rainbow Islands (1987) in the Bubble Bobble series.
Retro Gamer issue 19, 2005, p. 88: Taito Legends review (the rearranged theme).
Retro Gamer issue 23, p. 92: Rainbow Islands Revolution (DS, Rising Star Games) review (drawing triangles and circles on the touch screen).
Edge issue 154, October 2005, pp. 30–35: Rising Star Games interview and preview of Rainbow Islands Revolution (DS) and Evolution (PSP).
Retro Gamer issue 28, 2006, pp. 58–68, Stuart Campbell, “The Definitive Bubble Bobble”: the islands based on Arkanoid, Darius, The Fairyland Story and Bubble Bobble; Rainbow Islands Extra; the NES and Master System game and Ocean’s European NES version; the replaced tune; Rainbow Islands Enhanced.
Wireframe issue 29, December 2019, pp. 52–53, “Taito’s arcade golden age”: Fukio Mitsuji, Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands.
Retro Gamer issue 100, March 2012, p. 74: Braybrook’s coding and John Cumming’s graphics on the Amiga version.
Wireframe issue 57, November 2021, pp. 49–52: Jordi Santonja, “Make your own retro platformer” (the 1987 arcade release, the rules for rainbows).