For about as long as I can remember, the arcade has always been coded as a highly masculine experience. The games there are aggressive. Violent. If it’s not Street Fighters pounding each other to submission, you’ve still got a lone hero and maybe a friend facing off against huge armies with as little as a knife or as much a machine gun. So it was a bit of a surprise to me, entering a South Korean arcade for the first time in 2011 and finding that sure, you’ve got your Tekken and your Metal Slug. But the most omnipresent game at South Korean arcades, the one you could always count on being there, was…Bubble Bobble.
If you’re not familiar with Bubble Bobble, it’s about these two adorable little dinosaurs, Bub and Bob, going through a hundred screens in an effort to rescue their girlfriends (or possibly just girl friends). They trap enemies in bubbles and then break those bubbles with their little dinosaur spikes. I can’t really understate just how cute this game looks in motion. The music is outrageously saccharine. The colors are bright. There are streams and rainbows and even when the timer starts running and the monsters get faster and angrier everything about the presentation is sparkly.
Bubble Bobble is what we might have called a girly game, because of how it looks, although it’s not an easy game by any means. Even if you’re willing to push in as many quarters as it takes, the final levels take on puzzle elements where it’s a challenge just to figure out how to kill the enemies from a mechanical perspective. Bubble jumping (jumping on your own bubbles by holding the jump button down as you do so) is a core ability of the game that you don’t really need to know for the first few dozen levels but the game becomes quite impossible after a certain point if you haven’t figured out that it’s something you can do, and it’s not like you’re ever told.
Of course, relatively few people actually seriously try to win Bubble Bobble, a marathon task leading to the game’s sole, epic boss fight on the 100th floor. That’s not what Bubble Bobble does at the arcades. Rather, it’s a game that’s simple enough, and fun enough, to play with a date. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that actual arcades in South Korea are increasingly not as much of a thing since 2011. Rather, where you’re most likely to find arcade machines is at movie theaters. Savvier romantic gamers turn this into a win-win situation by showing up to the movie early solely so they can play a round or two of the game with their girlfriend- a nice warm-up activity.
The staying power of Bubble Bobble in this context is all the more remarkable as Bubble Bobble’s main claim to fame is just being the first version of this game. While the sequels were strictly speaking better games in that the mechanics are better developed and there’s more variety, they don’t work as well as date games precisely because the mechanics don’t work as well in terms of pick up and play. Having to blow bigger bubbles to catch bigger monsters is juuust complicated enough to turn off more inexperienced games while even the girliest of girls might feel a bit overwhelmed by how ludicrously colorful the later versions of the game get.
Ironically the Snow Bros. games turned out to be the best successors to the brand, with indirect but easy-to-understand combat, cutesy graphics that avoided being overbearing, and an overall structure more similar to modern games. I saw more Snow Bros. in South Korean arcades than Bubble Symphony, at any rate. What it all really comes down to is that nothing can really compete with the sheer cute simplicity of Bub and Bob in their glorious eight-bit design. Maybe some of the magic was just in the nostalgia of it all. Still, I’d never heard of Bubble Bobble before I got to South Korea, and I could feel the magic too.
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