Bubble Bobble
Hyper Spooky Game #1
Type of Game
A secret laboratory where cruel reptilians turn poor creatures into fruit and devour them.
Release date on our machines
1986 for the original Arcade game, October 1990 on the NES, 1987 on the Atari ST. Didn't check the other three thousand versions.
Developer
Taito Corporation, technically Square Enix, technically not exactly SMEs. Fukio Mitusji at the helm of the project (I pretend I know him).
Publisher
Taito for the NES (produced by Shoji Takahashi), Firebird Software for the Atari ST (a British telecoms company that disappeared in 1990, sry).
Bubble Bobble : available on the Nintendo eShop, the PSN, the Play Store, the Apple Store, and Steam, included in Bubble Bobble 4 Friends : the Baron's Workshop. All in the arcade version
I was five or six years old and I was visiting my cousin for one of the first times. Let's call him Walter Valise. I discovered his room full of wonders, toys, plushes, video cassettes, biscuits that were always better in his house than in ours (I first worshipped the Délichoc biscuits there)... and to top it all off, the Nintendo NES! I was just beginning to grasp the concept of a console at the time. OK, I'd already got to know the Master System at my dad's house, but it was still very new. And while we flattened a lot of Goombas and Koopas in Super Mario Bros., I fell even more in love with the cute dragons in Bubble Bobble. I didn't know it yet, but I was about to experience a whole load of master classes given by Walter on a whole load of video games.
First virtual slap
eclectic buffet
So, Bub and Bob, adorable little bubble-spitting reptiles. Well, adorable... their ultimate goal is to slaughter everything that crosses their path in order to get to the next level. The levels become more and more convoluted and overpopulated with creatures that clearly hated dragons. At the same time, you should have seen the look on the faces of these beasties... they just harboured a great deal of misplaced jealousy because they were a thousand times uglier than our scaly friends. But on the other hand, they were only defending themselves, weren't they? It looks like the dragons are coming to them rather than the other way round!
I don't know, maybe everyone was just mad at everyone else for no reason, and that seemed like a good enough incentive to try and get to the end of the game. Besides, how could we resist the temptation of packing up all those critters to let the dragons feast on cherries, tomatoes, hamburgers and glasses of... Martini? Rough Diamonds? Er... why not. I'm not judging the diet of these little lizards. There were quite a few tricks up the sleeve to renew the gameplay. The water bubbles for example, which, once burst, poured out in a torrent, taking everything in its path and turning all the enemies into a gargantuan fruity banquet (and other, stranger foods).
The umbrellas that let you pass several stages at once, the shoes that increase your avatar's speed, the lightning bubbles that... er, shoot electric arcs across a horizontal line, the crosses that... well, I don't know, and the letters you have to collect to form the word EXTEND? Wow, that's a good question! I can't remember half of it. And I think I know why.
On first glance, here is a video game that's cute, colourful and full of fun. Bub and Bob are cult characters who have been carrying their jovial air around for ages in various top lists of the best video games of all time. Unless I'm just pulling that out of my head, full of exaggerated memories from years gone by. Well, let's assume that's the case. We've already mentioned their nasty opponents and their harmlessness. In appearance only. Because, in fact, five minutes into the game, I ended up shaking with fear. The uniformly black background of the levels, the ever-increasing need to imprison the enraged monsters in bubbles...
Fake good vibes
Bursting them before the enemis emerge even more venomous, eating the resulting fruit before it disappears into nothingness, the platforms that save you but are virtually inaccessible unless you create a ladder of empty bubbles to climb up without wasting a second, the sometimes merciless timer, and Bub and Bob's cheerful looks that in fact conceal a murderous madness... the bucolic stroll soon turns into an expedition into the heart of hell! My initial placid confidence inevitably gave way to frantic anxiety at one point or another, and that feeling must have traumatised many other children. I can only imagine.
​banger at will
The soundtrack is limited to a single track. Well, more or less, the final boss also gets his own song, but I've never heard it. There's also music for the endings, bonus levels and... OK, I can't remember anything apart from one track! But what a track! It's a veritable hymn to good mood, enough to keep you going through the breathless pace of the game after a few stages. There are dozens of versions of this title, given that Bubble Bobble itself has been ported to a whole host of machines, not to mention remasters, reboots and remakes of varying degrees of inspiration. The NES soundcard pays a fine tribute to this classic melody, and I'm not just saying that because I discovered the game on that particular console (or maybe I did). In any case, between this and Crazy Frog to get me going, I quickly made my choice. Thank you Tadashi Kimijima, for this timeless chiptune nugget that gave me a lot of courage, and not just during games of Bubble Bobble.
Frightening like a whale
My cousin Walter collected so many games that he quickly got bored. At least, that's the impression I got from my visits to his house. When I returned to his room every two or three weeks demanding that he fires up the NES with the Bubble Bobble cartridge inside, he complied with less and less enthusiasm, and for a shorter and shorter time. I found a remedy for my misfortune in my best friend from first grade, who owned the game on the Atari ST. A certain Randall Geyser. We spat and bubbled like madlads, while looking at Golden Axe, Rick Dangerous 2 or Space Harrier (not forgetting Troubadours, International Karate, + and um, even a Strip Poker program that made us laugh without really knowing why). What's more, he too, was reacting to the creepy vibes emanating from it. Seriously, I dare you not to scream when certain enemies (the ones we called whales) get angry, turn red and fly three times as fast. And what about the ghost whales, sort of demonic versions of the aforementioned monsters, which appear when you don't move on fast enough to the next stage? Nothing, apart from a horrified groan. Well, you have to be six years old for that to work, all right. This phobia of flying cetaceans prevented us from completing this game, and I'd always thought that there were several hundred levels, possibly infested with horrors even more atrocious than those demonic rorquals ! I must have seen about fifty of these stages, at most. This game stayed with us for a very long time, via an arcade emulator I had installed on my computer.
We tried out other remakes, free or not, and had just as much fun every time. But if I loved Bubble Bobble so much, it's because it represented the beginning of my many visits to Walter Valise. Visits that promised fantastic discoveries every time, but which, I later realized, also took me out of the suffocating environment of my mother and stepfather's apartment. In Walter's home, I saw parents who really loved their kids, all the time, and not just in public to make themselves look good. But sorry, I'm not talking about dragons and bubbles anymore. I'll save the rest for my shrink.