2026-08-31 · blog
Bomber Boy (1990) — a port and a new game on one cartridge, and no agreement on which was the main one
Episode 43 of “Today Is Release Day”: Bomber Boy, published by Hudson Soft for the Game Boy in Japan on August 31, 1990, at 3,500 yen. There are two games inside. One mode is the NES Bomberman carried over whole. The other, the Bomber Boy mode, was made for this cartridge, and it has a shop. Clearing a round earns GP — based on how long you took and how many blocks you destroyed — and GP buys “panels.” Round panels keep working until you die; square panels last a single round. Levels are picked from a map rather than played in a fixed line. The interesting part is how it landed. Britain’s Mean Machines gave it 81, calling it a “highly addictive” port of Bomberman and welcoming the added password system. The Japanese wiki Game Catalogue instead praises the shop and equippable items for giving the game “a customisation of its own,” and files the complete NES Bomberman as the bonus: “quite a bargain for the time.” The main feature and the bonus swapped places depending on where you read about it. It reached North America as Atomic Punk on May 5, 1991, and Europe as Dynablaster in 1991 (as of 2026-08).
