I find it pretty amazing that Hudson Soft‘s famous maze-based, bomb-blasting game, Bomberman, was released for the ZX Spectrum in 1984, but it was. It was developed by Hudson Soft themselves and published by Sinclair Research in the UK (much like Hudson Soft‘s other famous Spectrum game, Stop the Express). Even more bizarre is the name of the game, but there was a good reason for the change…

You see, back in 1984 a series of terrorist bombings had been carried out by the Irish Republican Army during The Troubles, so all the European home computer versions of Bomberman were released as “Eric and the Floaters” by Hudson Soft, to avoid any association with these shocking events.

Eric and the Floaters on the Spectrum is a rather basic, but playable, version of Bomberman, with enemies that have been turned into nondescript balloons.

You run around a maze, destroying breakable walls with bombs in the hope of finding treasure, or an exit, and also trying to blow up the hostile balloons who’ll give chase if they sense you nearby. And all the while trying not to get caught in one of your own bomb blasts yourself, which is very easy to do if you’re not careful.

With every stage you complete the difficulty increases little by little, with more chasing enemies, and the occasional ‘auto bomb’ level (meaning: the bombs drop automatically, one after the other, which means that you’ve got to be on your toes to avoid blowing yourself up).

Eric and the Floaters is missing a lot of the features that defined later Bomberman games, like power-ups that increase the explosion range, and the brilliant multiplayer mode, but it does at least have the basic elements of Bomberman and is still fun to play. The game does slow down a bit on occasion – especially when bombs explode – but it’s still reasonably playable overall. What is disappointing, though, is the lack of variety of colour in the game. Why Hudson Soft didn’t vary the colours a bit more I don’t know. It would’ve been very easy to do and would’ve made for a much better-looking game.

While Eric and the Floaters is nowhere near what I would call a ‘must-play’ version of Bomberman, it remains an interesting historical curiosity on the humble 8-bit Speccy, as well as being a fairly compelling maze/chase game.

More: Bomberman on Wikipedia
More: Eric and the Floaters on World of Spectrum