The basic premise is just to kill all the floaters in the screen to get the bonus score and proceed to the next screen, but by blowing up destructible bricks, you could find treasure and an exit, through which you could escape to the next level without killing the floaters. In any case, Bomberman wasn't quite fully developed in its first outing. Of course, we all know without saying, how well that worked. The odd thing was, the only thing that was apparently needed to be censored was, that the enemies had faces in the original. A censored version was released in Europe as "Eric and the Floaters" for the MSX and Sinclair ZX Spectrum computers in 1984. Hudson Soft initially developed Bomber Man as a single-screen game of bombing action, and released it in July 1983 for the MSX, NEC PC-8801/6001, Sharp MZ-700 and FM-7 computers in Japan. Having this as the basis for the game instead of an additional gameplay feature was something worth exploring. The concept of laying down bombs that explode in a cross-pattern to destroy your enemies and some obstacles was not entirely new at the time of conception, since the basic idea was clearly taken from the aforementioned Warp & Warp. According to an article on Hudson Soft in the Next Generation magazine issue #3 (March 1995), the game was originally written as a technology demo for Hudson's BASIC compiler, and the original basic version was given a small release for Japanese PC's in 1983.Ī few versions of the original Bomber Man, left to right: MSX, NEC PC-9801, ZX Spectrum. However, in Berzerk, only the top-down view in a similar aspect as you would later get in games like Boulder Dash and Dig Dug and such, was the common nominator, while in Wizard of Wor, the player was controlled in a similar manner in a size-constrained maze like in Warp & Warp. However, I would hazard a guess that the game Warp & Warp took its biggest influences was from Berzerk from Stern Technologies, and Wizard of Wor from Midway, both released in 1980. It has been speculated elsewhere, that the most likely inspiration for Bomberman was Namco's Warp & Warp from 1981, which is as close as you can really get to Bomberman before 1983.
From 1983 to 2011, Hudson's flagship was undoubtedly Bomberman, and the ship continues to sail under the command of Konami to this day and onwards.Īrcade inspirations for Bomberman, left to right:īerzerk (Stern, 1980), Wizard of Wor (Midway, 1980), Warp & Warp (Namco, 1981) However, the publicly known game developing and producing history of Hudson began in 1983, when they switched their company policies and started developing proper video games for MSX, NEC computers and Nintendo's FamiCom system. In 1975, they began selling PC-related products, and in 1978, they started developing video game packages. So, only by modifying the idea from my earlier article on Paratroopers - its origins and variations (from 3 and a half years ago!), I can finally have the chance to talk about not only the original series, but also the numerous latter-time unofficial ports that are otherwise impossible to mention anywhere.
#Bomberman fantasy race remake series#
In truth, I have wanted to talk about the Bomberman series throughout the blog's history, and the subject has been often requested as well, but without limiting the area to a certain number of games or anything of the sort, it would be impossible to do just one article on it. While I was working on the remakes and demakes entry a while back, I considered including the various brilliant Bomberman (or Bomber Man, as it is sometimes written) clones made for various old platforms in the recent years, but it didn't take too long for me to realize, that it's too big of a subject to talk about in passing.
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