The History of Bomberman

The first Bomberman was a Japanese home computer game of July 1983, written in BASIC and called Bakudan Otoko, Bomb Man: a man in a bowler hat wiping out balloon shaped ghosts in a maze, one cross shaped explosion at a time. In Britain the same game, scrubbed of its title, was sold as Eric and the Floaters. Nobody involved could have guessed the maze would still be selling forty years later.

The famous version is the Famicom rebuild of December 20, 1985, programmed by Hudson director Shinichi Nakamoto. Nakamoto kept the formula, added the power up system that lets Bomberman grow stronger panel by panel, and made the decision that fixed the character forever: the bowler hatted man became a robot, borrowed outright from the enemy sprites of Hudson's own Famicom port of Lode Runner. His reasoning, on the record, was practical and a little cold. If the hero were a robot, he would not feel too sorry watching him blown apart by his own bombs. The game's ending completes the joke: clear the fiftieth stage and Bomberman turns human, into the hero of Lode Runner itself. The first Bomberman is, by its own ending, a Lode Runner prequel.