When I was around 7 years old, my biological parents separated. This was not a huge, traumatic experience for me. I had not developed a sense that anything was really wrong. I simply had two houses, and everyone, on a whole, seemed happier. There was an initial transition period where I was getting shuffled a lot between my two homes while my parents figured out who would be staying where, visitation rights, schools, etc. Through all this, I wound up spending a lot of time at my father's house. At that time he was frequently gone because he was a patrolman for the local sheriff's department, a position which required weird hours.

Because of that, my brother and I were routinely allowed to pick a rental game from a store within walking distance of our house. About once a week we would walk to the store and snag a new NES title to throw in the deck so as to kill the hours my father was away. My brother would always snag whatever shooting, scrolling, destruction fest he could find (Contra was a standard), and I would usually just grab whatever had fun cover art. I would run the gamut of late 80's cartoony titles and games based on recognizable movie licenses, no credit earned for taste. Eventually, I would come across a game called “Bubble Bobble". From the initial site of that bright red box covered in bubbles, fruit, wind up toys, wizards with canes, and dinosaurs, I was in heaven.

My brother immediately discouraged my decision, as he knew he would never enjoy anything as sugar sweet as what I held in my hands. This would only fuel my desire to bring it home, because anything he was trying to keep from me must have been a desperate plot to make me miserable. He scoffed and we slowly made our way home. Upon arriving, my older brother strong-armed his way to the machine to play whatever action-riddled blood-fest he had acquired, and I was forced to wait several hours before I could sit down with the NES.

The story line was simple enough: Bub and Bob, brothers, were enjoying the company of their respective girlfriends. A huge, crazy drunk in a green cape kidnapped the girls, transformed the boys into dragons, and took the ladies to the bottom of a deep labyrinth. Save the princesses, okay, easy. The game posed much more opposition than I was expecting, as the mechanics of the game were just brutal. Monsters had to be subdued by coughing bubbles at a glacial pace over a relatively short distance so as to trap the opposition inside. If the bubbles were not popped by the use of puncturing, stomping or smashing, the little fiends would eventually break free of their salivary prison, hopping red and angry. Later on, we were even forced to use the bubbles as slowly hovering platforms to access higher ledges or to avoid oncoming monsters. And, if we were lax in our operation, Baron von Blubba, a ghostly white whale, would eradicate us for taking too long to clear a level.

Over the week that my brother and I had the game we managed to make it to level 100, the bottom floor of the maze, where the super drunk would hammer us repeatedly. Hours of frustration would ultimately result in us coming up empty handed, leaving us forced to painfully push the power button, defeated. It was an afternoon filled with the deaths of hundreds of green and blue dragons for nothing. I would never manage to talk my brother into another Bubble Bobble session of that length again, nor would I see the super drunk for quite some time.

Years would go by, and I would eventually stop renting the game. Time passed and I got older. By this time the Super Nintendo was circling the drain, and all the cool kids were moving on to the next generation of consoles. I had decided to pick up a Sega Saturn, thinking that all of the good games would go to Sega. They initially had the big name in 32bit consoles, after all. The purchase was a bit extravagant as far as Christmas gifts go. My parents were generally resigned to spending less than $100 per child, and the console, which shipped with no titles, netted quite a bit more. After much begging and pleading, I managed to talk them into including a budget title with the purchase.

Sifting through the racks I eventually came across a copy of Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands for the low price of $20. I loved the NES version, and I was itching to give the game another shot. By this time my sister had grown from a drooling infant into a dexterous adolescent. She made the perfect copilot in my never-ending quest to save the girlfriends. We even had a ridiculous, ritualistic phrase we would say every time the game started. The Saturn version proved even more of a challenge, as it limited the number of continues and the number of lives players received. In the end, we never made it past level 70.

I never managed to find the original arcade release while growing up. It was a personal goal was I never able to fulfill. The arcade version developed somewhat of a cult following which ultimately inspirited Taito, among several competing game companies, to adopt the “capture and kill” game play for other titles. To this day, Bub and Bob routinely show up in alternate releases, and the game itself is still getting ported to new consoles, most recently to the PSP and DS. Having shipped on nearly every system imaginable, the game still has yet to be accurately recreated. All of the ports featured problematic control scheme changes, bonus timer problems, and a myriad of other issues which purists feverishly detested. Only recently has the game been able to be played outside of the arcade in its true form under MAME, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator. To satiate fans, Taito re-released the original game within the Taito Legends package. This is about as faithful as you can get without owning an actual copy of the arcade board.

Bubble Bobble was probably my first successful experience with co-operative game play. It was the first time that actually made it fun. Ultimately, I think it helped to foster the lasting friendship my siblings and I share with each other. The game is sentimental to me, yet I doubt that anyone picking it up right now will share the same nostalgic sense of camaraderie I developed from growing up playing it. Picking up a copy of Taito Legends is cheap--Dirt cheap in fact. The game retails for $5 new for PCs. There is no realistic reason why anyone should ever go without playing this game.