You thought I was done after a week? Turns out there's a hell of a lot more I have yet to say about the platform that was my introduction to the world of video games. Well, perhaps not regarding the device itself, but certainly for the wild and varied games that it would host in its tenure. My intent is to stick to a weekly schedule from here until (hopefully) the end of this year, looking at a new Atari ST game every Saturday. I want to keep things varied, so we'll be looking at console/Arcade ports, CRPGs, graphic adventure games, bizarre homebrew system exclusives and other oddities from the European home computer market. A mix of the familiar and the alien for our American friends.
Bubble Bobble
I figured for the first episode of ST-urday that we'd start on something simple. Taito's Bubble Bobble is a revered Arcade single-screen platformer classic that most people know best as an NES game. Two bubble-shooting dinosaurs Bub and Bob enter a cave of monsters to rescue their girlfriends and restore their human forms. That's all the plot we needed in the 80s.
While the original Arcade version was released in 1986 and the NES version in 1988, the Atari ST version sits between the two with a release date somewhere in 1987. The imaginatively-titled Software Creations handled the development of the computer conversions - a British developer that had quite the run producing various games and ports for the UK market until they were eventually bought out by Acclaim in the 2000s and followed them into bankruptcy shortly thereafter. Bubble Bobble is the first game they worked on, according to GameFAQs, but they'd go on to create many others: the ST versions of Renegade, Ghouls N' Ghosts and Gauntlet III, along with personal Nintendo console favorites like Solstice and Plok. Firebird, who popped up a number of times during the Estival Festival, was the publisher.
What's important is that Software Creations were actually competent at this whole "Arcade to home computer" conversion business, though one struggles to conceive of how you could mess up Bubble Bobble. After the disaster that was the Atari ST's Double Dragon, I figured I should start accentuating the positive a little more. (Don't worry, we'll have more crappy Arcade ports to come as well.)
Yeah, I realize this was kind of a softball with which introduce this new weekly feature, but it's best to start simple and work our way up to the headier stuff. That I'm suggesting a game where dinosaurs shoot bubbles at Frankensteins is a comparatively sane game to some of the material I have lined up is saying something. One day I hope to look at the equally great Atari ST ports of Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars (the successors to Bubble Bobble), but for now we'd best pop off.
(As this is the first in an ongoing feature, I've decided to keep track of what I've covered with this list. Future ST-urdays will also refer back to it.)
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