40 years of Bomberman: The music of Bomberman Hero

Bomberman's finest musical hour is a triumph that showed off what the N64's audio hardware was actually capable of.

July marks 40 years of Hudson Soft’s (and Konami’s) Bomberman franchise. Throughout the month, I’ll be covering Bomberman games, the versatility of its protagonist, and the legacy of both. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.

Whether Bomberman Hero is a good video game or not is up for debate. Sure, the people who don’t think it’s any good or that whined about the lack of multiplayer in it as a reason to not bother with Bomberman’s second Nintendo 64 adventure are wrong, but it’s the kind of wrong you can debate. What isn’t up for discussion is whether Bomberman Hero’s soundtrack is any good: it rips, the end, thanks for playing.

Bomberman Hero’s soundtrack is legendary, and has been included in best-ever lists as well as features on sites like Pitchfork — think about how many video games there have been, and then consider how impressive it is to make rank on something like that. Bomberman soundtracks in general — especially those composed by June Chikuma, like this one was — are excellent listens, loaded with personality and adding very clear value to the gameplay experience itself. Bomberman Hero’s is the best of them, which says something. Chikuma herself has said that it’s “the most remarkable title in terms of music among the Bomberman series,” and it’s also the source of this anecdote about actor Nicolas Cage’s taste in video games, in which he showed up in a retro store loaded with imports and requested, “the Bomberman game with the good soundtrack.” The employee in question, of course, knew what game this referred to, even though that shouldn’t have narrowed things down at all given the quality of the series’ soundtracks. And yet! We all know, don’t we?

Bomberman Hero’s soundtrack is more than just some killer tracks that show off Chikuma’s excellent understanding and use of drums and cymbals, as well as an extensive knowledge of various electronic dance music genres and subgenres. It’s also a showcase for what the Nintendo 64 was capable of on the audio side; like Bomberman Hero itself, the N64’s audio hardware was often criticized for what it wasn’t rather than what it actually was, and there was more here of importance than either was given credit for.

Nintendo made a massive change when they designed the N64, as they didn’t utilize a dedicated sound chip. The Super Nintendo and rival Sega Genesis had very distinct sounds, due to their vastly different approach when it came to choosing a sound chip — the SNES featured a chip designed by future rival Sony, that, while it did feature wavetable synthesis that would allow for a more “traditional” use of instruments, as Karen Collins put it in Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design, developers more often went for an enhanced version of the chiptune sound of the 8-bit era, which resulted in some more pop-oriented tracks, while the Genesis, with its heavy use of synth thanks to its Yamaha chip, was ideal for a more progressive rock-oriented sound and instrumentation. For the N64, Nintendo wanted to open things up more than the SNES had allowed, and in a decision that would give developers more freedom but also more work, didn’t include a dedicated sound chip.

So, without a sound chip in place, where did music come from on the Big N’s 64-bit system? The CPU itself, or the Reality Signal Processor (the RSP — which was already responsible for shading, clipping, lighting calculations, and more on the graphical side). Rather than a separate piece of hardware installed in-system like with the Sony chip in the SNES, the N64’s audio could all be processed by the same CPU that was responsible for ensuring that the game on the cartridge showed up on your television and played like it was supposed to. It was a decision that was often criticized at the time and also resulted in some poor sound quality for various games — more on that in a bit — but it was also something of an ahead-of-its-time, peek-into-the-future design. Nintendo seemed behind by sticking with expensive cartridges over moving to a CD-ROM format like Sega and Sony had with the Saturn and Playstation, respectively, but they had the one 64-bit system in a 32-bit world, and they were trying to push the boundaries of audio with that extra horsepower, too.

The decision to let the RSP and CPU process sound made the N64 more like a PC than a traditional home console, at least on the audio side: it utilized a unified memory subsystem that brought together audio, video, and the CPU in one place, which was also the direction that personal computers were heading in once more. Consider that the SNES had a soundchip, but it was designed to allow for audio samples that topped out at just 64kb in size. It took some slick thinking and programming by Yuzo Koshiro while composing for ActRaiser to discover the workaround for this limitation that would allow for less obvious looping and more complicated song structures in compositions for the platform, but that there was a limitation at all was the thing that eventually bothered Nintendo enough for them to do something about it at the hardware level.

The other thing, too, is that the amount of space that existed for audio in pre-N64 systems was set, and if that memory wasn’t used for audio as intended, well, it went unused, idle. With this change in hardware design, the audio’s only real limitation, in this particular light, was in how much memory was left for it after the graphics and such had been accounted for, but that was also clearly looking at things the wrong way for a developer who cared about sound quality. What the change could mean, instead, is that memory was no longer tied up in a preexisting task, but instead, if you needed less memory for audio at a given time, then it could be utilized elsewhere, such as on the graphical side, or vice versa. Memory didn’t have to be left idle with a system like this: nothing had to be wasted, but could instead be applied exactly where it was needed.

This wasn’t how things always worked in practice. As developer Factor 5 — known in part for their excellent audio quality and their understanding of hardware — put it in an interview with IGN in 1998: “The N64 shares its workload with the co-processor -- actually, let me rephrase that: The whole machine does it, because you can also make music with the CPU. It just seems that at the moment most people are preoccupied with pumping out cool graphics -- and that's also what most gamers want. And the more graphics you do on the N64, the less performance you have left over for sound.”

Bomberman Hero received an overdue official release on vinyl in 2023, the first international release of the original soundtrack. Image credit: Ship to Shore

Now, there were workarounds to squeeze more out of the CPU and RSP, but a developer had to put in the effort for them, which didn’t always happen. Instead, you ended up with a lot of audio compression, which affected the audio’s quality, so that all the “leftover” memory could be used on the graphical side. This wasn’t always how it went down, though. Later in that same interview, Factor 5’s rep explained that their audio achievements on the system came from “Completely new, homemade [audio] drivers from top to bottom,” which they also assumed Rare took the time to produce for their own high-quality audio development, as well. Not every developer did this, though, and the emphasis on graphics would sometimes mean there was little room left for quality, memory-consuming audio, resulting in a tinny, mono sound: on a small television playing through its built-in speakers, this might not be a big or even noticeable deal, but if your N64 was hooked up to a television with a sound system, well, you better hope you had a Factor 5 or Rare or Nintendo game in there.

Or, as Factor 5 put it, at least one not made by an American studio:

It looks like many Europeans have a little more bite on the technical side of things. From our perspective, the N64 is almost as complicated as the [Sega] Saturn. You can do amazing things, as those last Saturn games that are still coming also prove -- but you have to program in a way that you use the resources to a tee. And many people over here don't seem to be able to get to terms with that and the outcome is often disappointing. To say it bluntly, in that respect it seems that European and Japanese companies -- with few exceptions -- are simply better. Rare has gathered the cream of the European programming elite, and it's quite visible that they're technically ahead. And in Japan, look what Major A, Konami, managed to squeeze out of the N64. In that respect, it seems that many Americans just have a to try a little harder (laughs).

While the Saturn and Playstation utilized Red Book audio — the format of CD-ROMs, used in video games since those add-ons began appearing on 16-bit systems — the N64 was MIDI-based, which, again, made it more akin to audio on a PC than a traditional home console. A popular sound program utilized by N64 developers was MusyX, which allowed for all kinds of manipulation of sound samples and the kind of dynamic audio that could be difficult to pull off in a system with more restrictions than what the N64’s setup employed. As Collins explained, “The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time used a variety of dynamic approaches… For instance, when the player’s character encountered a threatening enemy, a subtle cross-fade occurred between the game-play music and the threat-music. Although critics may have disparaged the MIDI audio, in terms of advancing a dynamic approach to game sound, Nintendo was leagues ahead of its competitors in the console domain.”

Which brings us back to Bomberman Hero. Hudson Soft was a close partner with Nintendo when developing for their systems, with Nintendo even publishing a number of Bomberman titles in North America on the Game Boy and N64, so the ins and outs of the hardware weren’t a secret to them. Bomberman Hero was one such game that Nintendo had a vested interest in. Hudson had a reputation (and still had the resources), at the time, for squeezing as much as they could out of a system on the graphical side, as they had so often on the Turbgrafx-16 and PC Engine earlier in the decade. For Bomberman Hero, however, they went in a different direction: the graphics aren’t bad by any means, but it’s pretty clear that there was a focus on pushing the boundaries of the game’s audio instead. This is probably just one more reason critics of the time had little good to say about the title, given the obsession with graphical horsepower and 3D.

While Bomberman’s past music, for the most part, stuck with the kind of chiptune-focused sound that it had its origins in, Bomberman Hero would be different. There were no vestiges of the bomber’s chiptune past, nor arrangements of now-classic themes played through new hardware. Instead, Chikuma utilized the more open structure of the N64’s audio setup to compose a soundtrack comprised of jazz, Drum and Bass (DnB), leftfield electro, and acid techno, all of it a canvas for Chikuma to paint with syncopation. It’s genuinely difficult to believe that something this impressive, this high-quality, exists on the same system that has cartridges with tinny, mono audio on it, but tracks like “Foehn” are what you get when the N64’s hardware capabilities were recognized and taken advantage of by a developer:

An echo (or reverb) sound was often used to mask some of the sound issues created by compression on the N64, but with Bomberman Hero, the reverb isn’t a mask and is instead just part of the intended sound. And it fits so well with the incessant drum and cymbal hits that create that effect of syncopation, with something seemingly always happening off-beat as part of songs that very much have a clear — and catchy — beat to them. The Bomberman Hero soundtrack is loaded with EDM subgenres, which are stuffed full of drum techniques such as the paradiddle, a combination of single and double drum strokes: Chikuma’s earlier work also featured plenty of this, but like with the Arabic influences in Bomberman ‘94, the soundtrack wasn’t built around them so much as they served a reminder of what was possible with chiptunes that branched out beyond the more standard genres in video games, and worked as a variation on the game’s sound. In Bomberman Hero, that kind of drum and cymbal work is front-and-center, regardless of whether it’s acid techno, Drum and Bass, or jazz, whether synths are playing a minor role or are the star.

What also stands out is, to use professional parlance, how goddamn hard every track goes even when it doesn’t have to. “Cell” plays during the game’s opening movie, and feels like it should instead be used during a particularly rough bit of platforming and exploding, not for something so passive. It does serve to throw you right into what the game is about musically, at least:

“Redial” hits that perfect spot you want in a video game, where the music is great but isn’t distracting you from what’s happening on-screen, where it fits the setting exactly and becomes part of what’s driving you forward, compelling you to go on. The decision to have a stage’s music continue to play even while the pause menu is up was a great one: as much as another Chikuma track surely would have fit here, interrupting the already exceptional sound that was already playing would take away from the flow of it all, and the idea that each of these tracks really is a piece of the whole context where where they’re used.

Given Bomberman Hero’s structure, it’s also vital that tracks like the above stick with you and add to the experience rather than detract from it. Bomberman Hero was designed with replaying levels multiple times to achieve higher scores and unlock a true ending in mind; you will not be upset about hearing “Redial” again and again as you seek all the collectibles and secrets and foes to defeat, and if anything it becomes an excuse to want to replay a stage until you do find it all.

There’s little point in going track by track: you should have read this whole thing while listening to the embedded soundtrack, anyway, and keep it on until it’s done playing while you’re at it. They’re all bangers, they all contribute something worthwhile within the context they’re used in, but they also all still rule outside of that context. Bomberman Hero’s official soundtrack released on CD in Japan decades ago, but it took until 2023 for it to receive an official international release, this time as an LP, mastered from an original hardware recording. If you get a chance to acquire it and have the means to play it, do so.

The N64 didn’t get enough credit for its audio capabilities at the time, and sure, it didn’t entirely solve the problem it set out to on its own in one generation, but consider what it was able to allow for the creation of: a Bomberman game that allowed a talent like June Chikuma to go big, to create a brand new sound that was still very much true to the series given her previous shaping of what the Bomberman sound even meant to people, while also more clearly expressing the influences it had outside of the confines of limited sound samples and chiptunes. No offense to chiptunes meant, of course, it’s just ironic, let’s say, that one of the greatest soundtracks out there, one with tremendous staying power that exists outside of the popularity of the game it’s in, became such in no small part because it recognized where video game music could and maybe should go, on hardware that was attempting to espouse the same sentiment with its significant design changes from the consoles of the past. All while a games media, gamers themselves, and slate of developers obsessed with graphics over everything to the point they wanted to abandon that same past couldn’t see that the future of games audio was also at hand, if only it would be allowed to also be its present.

Hudson Soft, Bomberman Hero’s developer A.I. Co, and Chikuma all understood, though, and not to the detriment of the gameplay. Bomberman Hero is more of a traditional, faster-moving platformer than its predecessor, Bomberman 64, which was very much putting classic Bomberman play in a new perspective. It added new systems, new gameplay mechanics, and elicits the same joy of animation and design that Bomberman’s cartoony games tend to, while moving faster than Bomberman 64 was capable of. It didn’t skimp on the audio side while it did all of this, though, and sure, it might have needed a little more graphical polishing to streamline some of the aerial movement in a 3D space, but at the expense of the audio? No, everyone involved made the correct decision there, with the N64’s memory pool allotted as it should have been.

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