Retro spotlight: Tetris 2 + Bombliss
Tetris 2 (but not that one), featuring game credits that'll blow your mind.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Imagine, for a moment, that a game was developed by the designer of EarthBound, the director of the first four Dragon Quest games, a producer on the Zero Escape and Danganropa games, the founder of The Pokémon Company and Creatures Inc., with music composed by the person responsible for Dragon Quest’s music — all of it — and special thanks in the credits to a couple of industry legends like Shigeru Miyamoto and Masanobu Endō, two game designers whose works and teams were responsible for a not-insignificant part of the direction of video games as a whole from the 1980s forward.
Given you already read the headline, you know that the game in question is a version of Tetris — Tetris 2 + Bombliss, to be precise. The how of that might be something you still need answered, though. And it started with Tsunekazu Ishihara — who would join Ape Inc., the developers of EarthBound, in 1991 before eventually founding Creatures Inc. and The Pokémon Company — getting really, really into Tetris.
As Koichi Nakamura — who is both the aforementioned director of the first four Dragon Quests and a producer for the Zero Escape and Danganropa games — remembers it (courtesy Shmuplations), Ishihara played Tetris before its worldwide release and loved it, even eventually writing a book on the subject. Chunsoft, the developers and originators of Dragon Quest, weren’t thrilled with the Famicom port of the game produced by Bullet-Proof Software, and so maneuvered their way into making their own alongside the studio of Henk Rogers, who had secured the rights to the series before Ishihara, then with the studio SEDIC, could.
Nakamura: (laughs) It started when Ishihara played Tetris for the first time, on his computer I believe, and really fell in love with it. He did a bunch of research and learned that it was made by someone in the Soviet Union. Ishihara was planning to go to the Soviet Union to secure the rights, but he discovered that Henk Rogers (creator of The Black Onyx) of Bullet Proof Software (BPS) had just beat him to the punch and got the rights. Ishihara also met with Alexey Pajitnov (the creator of Tetris) when he came to Japan. He learned some greetings and basic expressions in Russian too. (laughs)
…
BPS then released a port of Tetris on the Famicom, but the controls in that version didn’t allow you to rotate the tetromino pieces while dropping them—it only allowed for “hard drops”. At Chunsoft we started playing the Famicom Tetris, and by and by, the desire grew in us to create a version of Tetris that would satisfy our desires as Tetris players…
Ishihara was so obsessed with Tetris that he wrote a book about it, and he gathered me and Masanobu Endo together and entreated us: “Let’s make our own Tetris game!!” That was how Tetris 2 + Bombliss got started.
What was Endō’s role in this, i.e. the reason Ishihara brought him into the conversation? It’s unclear, given he’s just listed under “special thanks” in the game’s credits, and his own studio — Game Studio — isn’t directly associated with it in any way. Nakamura was there, though, and would know better than the wiki pages, so, yes, in some capacity, the creator of both Xevious and The Tower of Druaga, two of the most influential games out there, was involved in this Tetris game, alongside key players for Pokémon and Dragon Quest and Zero Escape and Danganropa and hey, you know what? Mystery Dungeon, too, we’re already this far in to hyping up Nakamura, what’s one more popular franchise.
Like with Endō, Miyamoto’s specific role here is unknown as he’s just in the special thanks, but Nintendo did have rights to create and publish Tetris games at this time — including their own without the input of Bullet-Proof Software — and it was Miyamoto’s approval of the game that sold Nintendo on the partnership with BPS in the first place: Miyamoto responding to then-Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi’s question of how he knew Tetris is a good game with, “because your secretaries and accountants are playing it” is one of those things more people should have a chance to chuckle at. Anyway, maybe there were some legal rights hurdle to leap related to Nintendo’s licensing partnership of Tetris, or Miyamoto had some kind of professional input, or he simply helped setup a chat with Bullet-Proof Software given his prior relationship. Regardless of the what, it was enough to make him one of two people thanked in the credits of Tetris 2 + Bombliss.
Koichi Sugiyama was already working with Chunsoft all the time to compose for the Dragon Quest games, and he contributed the soundtrack for Tetris 2 + Bombliss, as well, with a sound that is very clearly his heard throughout. Ishihara wasn’t the lone EarthBound connection for this Tetris variant, by the way, as Akihiko Miura was the game designer for EarthBound during his time with Ape, and also designed the Bombliss mode of Tetris 2 + Bombliss. Considering this variant has persisted throughout the decades and EarthBound remains a beloved and influential role-playing game, that’s a pretty good early career run for Miura.
Now, this isn’t the Tetris 2 that you’re familiar with if you grew up in North America and played it there: that’s a different Tetris 2. And that one is known as Tetris Flash in Japan, not just because of that word’s relation to the game inside the box, but also because Tetris 2 was already taken two years prior by Chunsoft’s Japan-only Famicom release. And that Tetris is good fun, as Tetris tends to be, but it’s not what needs the focus here. That would be Bombliss instead, since it was the variant of Tetris created by Chunsoft in this co-developed title with Bullet-Proof Software, and included within their port that suited their gameplay preferences.
Bombliss uses bombs for its central mechanic. You’re still dropping tetrominoes (though, some are some purposefully unwieldy new shapes), and you’re still clearing lines, but filling up an entire row with blocks is no longer enough. It’s merely a trigger for setting off an explosion that’ll do the clearing for you, and the size of the explosion is directly related to two things: the placement of the bomb blocks within the rows, and how many rows with bombs you can clear at once. Combos mean bigger explosions, and bigger explosions mean more blocks blown up. Once all the blocks have been exploded, the level is over, and it’s on to the next.
Rather than counting up points for cleared lines, Bombliss essentially counts down, starting from 100. The more moves you have to make, the longer it takes to clear the play area of blocks, the fewer points you’ll get at the end of the stage. The default “previous high” is 50 for the puzzle stages, which acts as something of a par or baseline for you. Staying as close to 100 as possible is the goal, and to do so, you’ll have to set up some combos, and take advantage of the fact that placing four bomb blocks in a square shape will create a giant bomb that’ll set off a massive explosion even if it’s just in a single-line, non-combo clear.
Lines without bombs in them won’t clear, but still count towards combos if you’ve got other connected lines that’ll blow, so they might end up exploded out of existence anyway, if you do it right. Where do the bombs come from? They’re part of the tetrominoes that fall down, usually just one to a piece, but sometimes the whole thing is made out of bombs, which is excellent for digging your way out of a mess or just blowing stuff up in a hurry. In the Famicom version of Bombliss, there are five-block tetrominoes, which can fry your brain if you’re limiting yourself to just the kind of patterns you’re used to being able to see and fill in while playing Tetris. Bombliss has its own pieces, even if some of what you’ll play with looks familiar, and once you start to get a feel for its specifics, you’ll be blowing up combos of lines in a hurry.
A single bomb being in a line isn’t enough to explode the entire line away: you need to have multiple bombs, placed accordingly, to have that kind of range for your explosion. Bombs will only impact the line they’re included in, unless you manage to clear multiple lines at once, in which case the explosions can reach out and potentially set off other bombs. The Tetris Wiki includes a table that lays out each possible combo, but the gist of it is that a single bomb on a single line will create a 7x1 explosion, while two lines means a 7x3, three a 7x5, and so on, while a large bomb can blow up a 10x8 on its own. Combos matter! You can clear a whole lot of levels just one line at a time, but to finish as quickly as possible, you’ll need to do better than that.
There are three different game modes within Bombliss on the Famicom. The first is “Contest,” which scores as previously described, with you trying to clear a play area as quickly as possible to manage as close of a score to 100 as you can.
The next is “Puzzle,” which includes nine Levels, with 10 stages each. In Puzzle, there are a specific number of pieces you’ll receive in each, and your goal is to blow up all of the blocks by the time you run out of available pieces. Which isn’t just a matter of placing the tetrominoes in the correct place, but also with the bomb within the tetrominoes in the proper alignment as well, to maximize your explosion range. Which is to say that, in the first Puzzle, you can place both five-block pieces flat on the bottom of the play area like you’re supposed to and still lose. Things get more complicated from there.
The third mode, “Construction,” allows you to create your own Bombliss stages. Which maybe means nothing to you, or everything to you, depending on the kind of mind for Tetris you’ve got.
Bombliss was not a one and done concept for Tetris. This was it for Chunsoft, but Tose would end up porting the game (with some changes) to the Game Boy in 1995 alongside Bullet-Proof Software as Tetris Blast, and an enhanced Game Boy Color edition, Super Bombliss, would release in 1998. Tetris 2 + Bombliss received a Super Famicom port, Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss, which enhances the game for the 16-bit system. It’s the same base game, but it looks and sounds different due to the more powerful hardware, and it also removed the Construction mode. Versions of Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss would end up on various home computer platforms, as well, from Windows and Macintosh to PC-98.
Beyond that, multiple Tetris releases would include a Bombliss mode without advertising it in the game’s title. Tetris Party Deluxe, the physical (and expanded) edition of Tetris Party for the Nintendo Wii and DS, is one such game, while Tetris: Axis for the Nintendo 3DS is another. In both cases, Hudson Soft was the developer, with the publishers varying by region. Tetris: Axis released in 2013, which means it’s been awhile since we’ve had a Bombliss variant. Whether by re-releasing one of the original versions of Tetris 2 + Bombliss, or once again including the mode in a modern, new Tetris, we’re due for a return to Chunsoft’s original idea.
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