40 years of Bomberman: The versatility of Bomberman
It's easy to forget now, since Konami has focused on multiplayer arena games, but Bomberman used to be Hudson Soft's Mario, meaning, anything they needed him to be.
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.
If your familiarity with Bomberman is solely from the Konami years, then you might not be aware of just what his role was for Hudson Soft prior to that acquisition. While Bomberman wasn’t initially the mascot and flagship franchise for Hudson, by the time the popularity of the PC Engine/Turbografx-16 had hit its apex — and when Hudson needed to figure out life as exclusively a third-party developer and publisher again post-NEC partnership — Bomberman was the man. The robot, really, but hey, “man” is right there in his name.
While the first few (non-spinoff a la RoboWarrior) games in the Bomberman series were all maze and arena games where what is now the traditional style of Bomberman gameplay was utilized, Hudson started to open things up in the mid-90s. Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman! was released outside of Japan in 1994 as a crossover title, and while it was still traditional Bomberman — topdown mazes and arenas, eventually some boss fights at the end of a world — it was also a game where you could play as Wario instead. It wouldn’t be Bomberman’s last crossover or appearance in a “featuring” role, either.
It also wasn’t the full start of a series of moving Bomberman out of his traditional space, not yet: the real changes would come later, and alongside the continuation of more traditionally-minded games like the five (5!) Super Bomberman ones, or Saturn Bomberman. Pocket Bomberman, released on the Game Boy in 1997 in Japan and in Europe and then as a launch title for the Game Boy Color in ‘98, was a 2D, sidescrolling Bomberman that intelligently adapted the gameplay Bomberman fans were used to in a way 2D platformer fans could enjoy. Bomberman would also make his debut in a 3D platformer in 1997, with Bomberman 64 on the Nintendo 64 (in Japan, this game is instead named Baku Bomberman, a distinction that would matter when the Japan-only Bomberman 64 released in the style of the SNES Super Bomberman titles). And these early platformers played in very different ways, as well, and in more of a sense than just that one is in 3D and the other was a 2D sidescroller: Bomberman 64 is a platformer without a jump button, while Pocket Bomberman not only let you jump, but had a “Wings” power-up that served as, at the least, a way to double jump.
Bomberman Hero focused so much on its 3D platforming that it didn’t release with multiplayer, despite being an N64 game that could have supported, out of the box, four players at once. It was dinged for this at the time, but given Bomberman 64 had released a year earlier on the same system, there really wasn’t anything wrong with focusing development entirely on a more refined 3D experience that was also significantly different than the previous one, something of a blend of 3D and 2D platforming that wasn’t 2.5D, no, but instead was similar to what you’d find in later platformers like Treasure’s Wario World. And they were both published by Nintendo, too; it’s not as if Hudson was releasing these things into the wild without any kind of marketing support.
And then there’s Bomberman 64: The Second Attack, a late-life N64 game that didn’t produce or sell many cartridges, and that you don’t want to know the secondhand price of these days. This title was another 3D platformer similar to the game its a sequel to, but with one very vital difference: it introduced Pommy, an animal companion known as a Charabom. Pommy was a partner to Bomberman in this game, who could be raised (after hatching from an egg) to fight alongside him. Games where you raised monsters were a genre unto themselves at this point, between Pokémon, Monster Rancher, Dragon Quest Monsters, and Hudson’s own Robopon (robots, not monsters, but same principles otherwise), so Bomberman having a little bit of that slide right into an otherwise unrelated genre not only made sense, but also represents the kind of thinking Hudson was deploying with a character who was now their jack of all trades.
While all of this was going on with Nintendo’s 64-bit system, Hudson was experimenting even further in the handheld space. The followup to Pocket Bomberman was Bomberman Quest, a topdown action-adventure game that is both “Zelda, but make it Bomberman,” and also much more than “just” that. While this initial title is the only “Quest” one, this particular thread would continue to be pulled on by Hudson over the years: Bomberman Tournament was known as Bomberman Story in Japan, and that title more accurately conveys what’s going on, as it’s an action-adventure title that happens to have traditional multiplayer, too, and there would be a Japan- and Europe-only sequel, Bomberman Story 2, for the DS.
Bomberman Tournament didn’t just bring back Pommy and the Charabom concept, but opened it up considerably, with a whole bunch of Charabom to find and recruit, as well as to create by combining two Charabom together, with science. Unlike in something like Dragon Quest Monsters or Shin Megami Tensei, where you’d lose the monsters/demons in question in order to create a new one from them, these Charabom stick around: they’re just being used to create a new species, not to be that species themselves. The “Tournament” part of the name had to do with the gauntlets you could put trained Charaboms through in order to win some additional items and prizes; all in all, it was a small part of the gameplay and not the focus in Bomberman Tournament, but the way you upgraded Charabom, switched between them for different environmental puzzles and progression, and had them further linked to the gameplay would carry on in other games and genres, too, and made Tournament different from Bomberman titles that came before.
Bomberman Generation, a lovely 3D platformer on the GameCube, would bring over the Charaboms from Tournament and make them even more important to progression, with the battling and improving aspects also less optional this time and more a central part of the gameplay. Bomberman Max was a two-cartridge setup a la Pokémon, where if you played “Blue” you’d have Bomberman as the protagonist, and for “Red,” you’d play as another character and ally, Max. While the first of the Max games is fairly traditional otherwise, the second pair, Bomberman Max Advance, utilized Charaboms extensively in a Battle Game you could play completely separately from the main story. Max Advance served as a combination of classic Bomberman gameplay and the kind that had emerged in its then-later years, with the series branching out into other realms without ever truly leaving its roots behind.
Bomberman would also appear in plenty of non-mainline games that Hudson either developed or published in this stretch. Bomberman Wars, released in Japan on the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn, is a strategy RPG featuring Bombermen tactically dropping bombs around a map in turn-based grid combat. Bomberman: Panic Bomber is a falling block puzzle game that differentiated itself enough from the very crowded field by leaning on Bomberman gameplay logic and quirks, released for the Neo Geo, Super Famicom, PC Engine, and various Japanese PCs. Bomberman Fantasy Race came out on the Playstation in Japan, North America, and Europe between 1998 and 2000, and saw Bomberman racing atop his kangaroo-like pal, Louie. This wouldn’t be the lone Bomberman racer, either, as Bomberman Kart — and its updated and expanded version, Bomberman Kart DX — would be Japanese exclusives on the Playstation 2 a few years later. Bomberman Battles (or Bomberman Hardball, if you’re in Europe) has the classic multiplayer mode with bomb placement, but also baseball, tennis, and golf modes, and a “Living” mode where you design a custom Bomberman to be used in these other modes.
And then there are the Bomberman Land games, a spin-off series spanning seven different releases. These are mini-game collections, party games, and popular enough to release throughout much of the aughts until the plug was pulled on basically everything besides more topdown arena multiplayer titles for the series. They have their own story modes and mission structures, too, but the first one takes place at an amusement park instead of with Bomberman venturing throughout space to find planets to explore, and is very mini-game and multiplayer focused. There would be Bomberman Land games for the Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation Portable, GameCube, Nintendo Wii, and DS.
There was enough Bomberman to go around that the character would also end up in three different anime series. Bomberman Jetters ended up having its own pair of video games that were based on the series — one released worldwide for the GameCube, and another for the Game Boy Advance but only in Japan — with the latter being a standalone story within that same universe, told through an action-adventure game. And then there’s the B-Daman crossover: B-Daman is a marble shooting toy in Japan, and there were two different anime series born out of the partnership between Hudson and the toy. Bomberman B-Daman Bakugaiden, and Bomberman B-Daman Bakugaiden V. And with two anime series came many video game adaptations, three all together. The two released for the Game Boy Color in 1999 and 2000, respectively, were action role-playing games set in Bakugaiden V’s universe, where Bomberman’s traditional bombs were replaced with marbles.
Bomberman got to be himself on plenty of occasions, with Hudson developing, publishing, or even licensing the character out over the years in the form people are most familiar with. He also was able to branch out again and again, though, in ways that made him not just the equivalent to Nintendo’s Mario in terms of versatility and flexibility, but also Hudson’s Link, their own Pokémon trainer, and if you want to throw shoot ‘em up Star Parodier into the mix, too, then their Star Fox as well, for lack of a better comp. Bomberman was everything Hudson needed the character and series to be. A reliable source of multiplayer fun. The protagonist in a variety of single-player adventures, whether a 2D or 3D platformer, a topdown action-adventure title, or even a strategy role-playing game. A kart racer, an athlete, a representative of Hudson (and Konami) in two different fighting games (DreamMix TV World Fighters, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as both an assist trophy and Mii fighter “costume”), a spaceship mechanic and pilot and also robo ship himself, the star of a rhythm-action spin-off, and even as a series of moe anime girls whose clothes could be burned off to fuel gamer horniness.
This era of Bomberman has mostly been over for some time now, and with Konami cutting down on how often Bomberman games even releases or keeping the oddities like Bombergirl and Amazing Bomberman either in Japan or with limited releases to services like Apple Arcade, it doesn’t feel like it’s coming back. It would be easier to lament the end of it if the games of the past were available to fill the gap, but they aren’t, not unless you’re real dedicated to secondhand shopping for dead consoles, or the emulation scene. It’s a shame, too, as this means that we’re moving further away from a general understanding that Bomberman was capable of so much more than “just” arena multiplayer. Bomberman was anything Hudson needed it to be, and thanks to some innovations and blending of Bomberman’s traditional gameplay with other genres, those games are still a good time decades after the fact.
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