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Rating: "Now, it is beginning of a fantastic story!! Let's make a journey to the cave of monsters! Good luck!". That’s how it all began. You would insert your two hundred lire and off you went. To reach the hundredth screen, you needed luck, but not as much as one might think, because Bubble Bobble was and still is a surgical game, where everything (or almost everything) was meticulously planned.
Bubble Bobble arrived relatively late in arcades and youth centers around the world, at least compared to other legendary arcade games like Donkey Kong or Arkanoid: published in 1986, it likely landed in Italy in the early months of '87. I believe it's impossible to pinpoint the reason for this video game’s extraordinary success, which over the years has remained an absolute reference point for the arcade world, so much so that its "offspring" are countless, starting with Rainbow Island and leading up to Puzzle Bobble. Probably the true charm of this endless journey with the two little dragons lies in the fact that you faced a rigorous game, with strict rules and almost infallible methods to overcome each level, but at the same time, it concealed a world of secret codes, tricks, Byzantine refinements inserted by programmers at every level that from the start fueled an endless series of legends (almost all true, by the way). With Bubble Bobble, nothing is ever what it seems: there’s always a hidden level with new tricks, a finesse you failed to grasp, a further quirk that forced you to re-insert two hundred lire into that damned booth.
Bubble Bobble enthusiasts are still divided into two schools of thought: those who aim to finish each screen as quickly as possible, and those who focus on scoring as many points as possible (another deviance of the '80s arcades: trying to score as many points as possible to be at the top of the leaderboard, a real obsession). It's also splendid to play in pairs, creating a symbiosis with your partner, a symbiosis that inevitably turned into a subtle struggle made of small pranks or major thefts.
Bubble Bobble, with its delightfully consistent music, with its irresistibly kitsch colors, with its thousand secrets and its simple and straightforward rules remains a milestone that marked the adolescence of a couple of generations. It's pointless to write anything more; I'm sure all of you players have your own personal memory linked to those endless afternoons spent glued to the old cabinets.
Oh, for the record: I always preferred Bob, the blue dragon.
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