Bubbles

About Bubbles

Bubbles (1983) is Williams' offbeat arcade game in which a soap bubble cleans a kitchen sink, a non-violent take on Pac-Man by John Kotlarik and Python Anghelo, sold partly in a cylindrical plastic cabinet.

Bubbles in Depth

Seen from above, the player steers a soap bubble around a kitchen sink, absorbing ants, crumbs and grease spots before they slide down the drain. As it absorbs more, the bubble grows, gaining eyes and then a smiling mouth. Sponges and scrub brushes drift around cleaning the sink in competition, and touching one costs a life unless the bubble is at its largest, in which case the enemy is knocked away and the bubble shrinks; knocking sponges and brushes down the drain removes them for bonus points. Razor blades are always fatal, and roaches crawling from the drain can only be touched safely when carrying a broom, picked up from a cleaning lady who sometimes appears.

A level ends when all the point-scoring objects are gone; a bubble with a complete face moves on, otherwise a life is lost and the level replayed. Once the bubble has a face, the player can skip ahead by entering the drain when it flashes green, though going in too small costs a life. Kotlarik made the bubble accelerate in the joystick's direction and coast slowly to a stop when it is released, so the digital stick behaves almost like an analogue one, as though gliding on a slick surface.

Making Bubbles

Kotlarik wanted a non-violent game with Pac-Man-like play in an open field rather than a maze, and Anghelo developed the concept with artwork, a scenario and the cabinet designs. It runs on Defender-like hardware with a 1 MHz Motorola 6809E and 48 KB of ROM. Williams showed it at the Amusement Operators Expo in Chicago in March 1983, where Electronic Fun called it a "goof-fest" with "superb" if monotonously blue graphics and Video Games called it a "nice change of pace", and Play Meter ranked it among the top fifteen arcade games by September. Computer and Video Games found its premise "pretty weird" and short-lived, and Video Games' John Holmstrom later saw it as evidence of Williams' decline. It had no sequel or home port until compilations from Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits in 1996 to Midway Arcade Origins, and a Shockwave web version appeared in 2000. Retrospective views have been mixed, Shacknews calling it "underrated" and Retro Gamer regretting how few remember it.