That’s why I designed cute characters and included cooperative play in Bubble Bobble.“ “So I thought bringing more couples would help solve this issue. “Back then, women were rarely seen in Japanese arcades,” Mitsuji later said in a video interview for the Taito Legends game compilation. Mitsuji’s plan was to make a game that couples could play together – a concept which seems to have informed its mix of boisterous action and cute graphics. It’s easy to see Chack ‘N Pop’s influence on Bubble Bobble, though, and some of the collectible items and enemy sprites were lifted wholesale from that earlier game.īubble Bobble was created by Fukio Mitsuji, the Taito designer and artist who also made the arcade games Volfied, Syvalion, Halley’s Comet (later ported to the Famicom and Sega Game Gear as Halley Wars) and the even more obscure Commando clone, LSA Squad. Chack ‘N Pop also has you bounding around a single screen killing enemies, but this time the death mechanic involves a kind of hand grenade-type weapon – a far less memorable device than Bubble Bobble’s soapy-mouthed dragons. Taito had dabbled in the platform genre before, and the largely forgotten 1983 arcade game Chack ‘N Pop – later ported to Japanese home systems like the Nintendo Famicom – could be seen as Bubble Bobble’s prototype. Alternatively, you can use your bubbles as a temporary platform by holding down jump and bouncing on top of them – a technique that becomes vital to master on later screens, some of which seem expressly designed to leave you trapped.

Bubbles will rise up out of reach if you’re too slow to burst them, leaving an enemy dangling in mid-air until they escape (which leaves them charging around the screen in a crimson rage). The addition of wobbly, floating bubbles adds an air of unpredictablility to the Space Panic formula.

Bubble pop arcade game