Bomb Bee

Bomb Bee is a 1979 arcade game from the Japanese company Namco, credited here as both developer and publisher. The record describes a top-down view and support for one player or more.

1979 sits very early in arcade history. Cabinets of that period worked with a few dozen kilobytes of memory, simple circuitry and principles inherited from electromechanical machines. Bouncing a ball around a playfield full of targets was among the most widespread schemes precisely because it can be programmed with minimal resources while still generating endless variety.

A top-down view means the whole playfield is visible at once. That was essential in an arcade - the operator and passers-by had to see what was happening, and the screen could not scroll away from the action. Score values and a high-score table then carried the entire motivation to play again.

In 1979 Namco was a company just beginning to publish its own titles at scale; the period that made the brand famous followed shortly after. The multiplayer support in the record matches the convention of the time, where two players took alternating turns after losing a life.

Preserving games from 1979 is a story of its own. Circuit boards decayed, operators converted them to run different games, and no documentation was kept, so many early cabinets survive only because enthusiasts read out the contents of their memory chips before those chips became unreadable.

This late-seventies cabinet is one you can play in the browser window here at OldGame.cz, together with its year, the Namco credit and images.