Bomberman · Protagonist · Debut: 1983 · Sharp X1 / PC-8801 / NES · Created by Yuji Tanaka, Toshiyuki Sasagawa and Shinichi Nakamoto (Hudson Soft)
Hudson Soft's maze-running bomb-layer began as a 1983 computer game and became the face of multiplayer party gaming — up to five players on the PC Engine, ten on the Saturn.
Bomber Man was released in Japan in July 1983 for the Sharp X1 and then ported to the PC-8801 and other computers. Created at Hudson Soft by Yuji Tanaka, Toshiyuki Sasagawa and Shinichi Nakamoto, it asked the player to navigate a maze and defeat balloon-shaped enemies with time bombs whose blasts extend in straight lines. Outside Japan it was released in 1984 under the title Eric and the Floaters, sidestepping the word "bomb". The character reached a much larger audience with the 1985 NES version, but the series' real identity arrived with multiplayer. The 1990 PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) game supported up to five players at once, turning the simple rules of the single-player maze into a frantic battle game in which players trap and blow each other up. That battle mode became the heart of the franchise through the Super Bomberman games on the Super Famicom and Saturn Bomberman, which supported ten local players. Bomberman served as Hudson Soft's mascot for decades. When Konami acquired Hudson in 2011, the character and series passed to Konami, which has continued to release new games and collections.
Bomberman's single-player rules were modest. What made the series endure was the discovery that the same mechanics — a grid, bombs, blast lines — produced a perfect competitive game for several people on one screen, and Hudson built the series around that discovery for the next thirty years.