I visited a retro gaming arcade and played Bomberman, taking me back 30 years – now I've downloaded the games for Switch 2 to 'live in the nostalgia'
Retro gaming is going strong – and my rediscovery of Bomberman is a blessing
Last month, after an unexpected turn of events, I found myself out in London town with a bunch of colleagues. At a certain point our attention turned to the gaming arcade down the road (shout out to NQ64, which I didn't even know existed until that moment).
Turns out that arcades aren't totally dead, although this establishment is as much about pouring pints as it is about gamers pouring over others aiming for that Mortal Kombat high score. I never was one for beat-'em-ups, but to my delight I did stumble upon an all-time classic that I just had to play.
Bomberman, which I was first introduced to back in the mid-1990s – via a Blockbuster Video rental to play on my brother's SNES console, no less – was there in full-size arcade form, so I just had to grab some tokens to play. And the memories came flooding back in – it was like being a 10-year-old kid all over again.
Super Bomberman was released by Konami in 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or SNES, as most people in the UK called it – myself included) and was an instant hit. It sold half a million copies in its native Japan, which was a big deal. So sequels came in abundance, but only a handful of which I got to try.
I never got to play them all, though, as obtaining SNES cartridges was a pricey business – especially for a school kid. That's why the Blockbuster route of £3.49 (from memory – assume $5) rentals for three days was such a benefit back then. Otherwise games were either saved up for with pocket money, or the fortune of a birthday or Christmas present.
Fortunately, though, there's Bomberman Collection, which I've duly just downloaded from the Nintendo eStore on my Switch 2. It contains the aforementioned 1993 title, plus Super Bomberman 2 (1994), Super Bomberman 3 (1995), Super Bomberman 4 (1996) and Super Bomberman 5 (1997) – you can see the year-on-year creative titles in full effect right there, eh!
Now, you can purchase this game bundle for other formats, such as PlayStation 5, but I find the portable nature of Nintendo's console to be just that much more preferable. It's not as though the graphics are much to shout about – much as the Switch 2 version curiously boasts a "4K graphics" 'upgrade' – as they convert exactly as they were at launch. There's even a 'fake' CRT monitor overlay, rounded edges and all.
My all-time favourite version of Bomberman, however, is even more of a rarity. Released in 1997 for the Sega Saturn, Saturn Bomberman was unlike any of the other games. Crisper in appearance, able to run 10 players in tandem multi-player battle mode – if you had two multi-taps and enough controllers – playing the older 1993 title got me reminiscing about this game in particular.
Saturn Bomberman is seriously hard to obtain, though, and certainly isn't available for Switch. Even today, if you find a copy on eBay or at a CEX store then it'll set you back around £/$100 for the privilege. And that's without possessing a Sega Saturn console (and its inevitable CR2032 battery for on-board memory storage – the most stupid aspect of console design in recent history), which are also costly.
This retro gaming business can therefore be quite an expensive hobby. But it has increasingly got me thinking about going all-in, finding a Sega Saturn again, and digging for some others classics. Titles such as Guardian Heroes also springs to mind as Saturn special. And I never got to play Panzer Dragoon Saga nor Burning Rangers – both heralded as classics that never had the chance to find their audience, owed to the Saturn's low sales and untimely demise.
Right now, though, I've got half a dozen Super Bomberman games to dig back into to whet my retro gaming appetite. Playing the first one has really taken me back to my childhood home, sat on my brother's bed, playing with a controller each in participation. We had silly names for the various power-ups that've stuck in memory to this day.
There's even more on the download, too, with the original Japanese Famicom games Bomberman (1985) and Bomberman II (1991). That was for the NES console equivalent, but those games weren't released in Europe or North America at the time. Now's as good a time as ever to explore them – although the nostalgia there is a moot point, as I wouldn't have been cognitive enough to play them back at the original release date.
Retro gaming is clearly seeing a big comeback. My T3 colleague recently wrote about a NES-lookalike console that's capable of playing AAA PC games alongside the classics, for example, while a "re-launch" of the Nintendo 64, under the guise of Analogue 3D, went on sale recently (and can still be purchased now – it'll run your old N64 carts!). I, however, am gleefully sticking with Bomberman to 'live in the nostalgia' for the time being.
