![]() Yashiro Oda holds the official record for this game with 1,566,960 points on August 1, 1984. The humorous animated action was a nice complement to Williams' cadre of famous sci-fi pulse racers. 'If we'd made kits for those things we could have easily sold a couple hundred thousand', says Tom Cahill of the Williams service department.īubbles created a play environment like no other game of its time. When blemished, they could easily be fixed by heating and smoothing the plastic. When crushed, they would spring back to shape like an accordion. The plastic cabinets were almost indestructible. Black plastic ones were created for " Blaster" and a handful of "Sinistar" test machines. The Bubbles cabinets were in blue plastic. The shape was cylindrical with a domed top. Mechanical engineer Gary Berge developed it by using a special rotational molding process. Anghelo also came up with the concept for a unique all plastic cabinet for Bubbles. The wood cabinet graphics, created by Anghelo, were some of the best of all the Williams classic games. The game had different movement than any other immediate response game of its kind.īubbles also had innovative cabinet design. It was an attempt to make an analog control out of an eight way digital joystick. The longer you held the joystick down, the faster you would go and experience a slight decrease in velocity once you started to coast. To do this, Kotlarik had to do what he calls the damping of the velocity profile. They wanted to program the bubble to move like it was on ice, or water, and not a hard surface track. The big challenge of programming the game was creating the drift movement of the free floating player bubble, which was a lot more complex than meets the eye. Piloting your scrubbing bubble, the goal was to scour sink after sink of scurrying scum. It was certainly the only game ever to create a character out of something as sinister and bizarre as a razor blade. The game had crumbs, ants, greasies, sponges, brushes and the Cleaning Lady. Even then, the cast of Bubbles stood out from the crowd. The early '80s were an era populated with off the wall video game characters like Q*Bert, Dig Dug, and Mr. Together they brought the kitchen sink to life. Kotlarik had helped out on the sounds for " Joust" and " Defender", as well as creating the voice for Williams' first voice synthesized pinball game, " Gorgar". ![]() Python had previously worked on many other Williams games, including much of the art for " Joust". Kotlarik came up with the initial concept and Python Anghelo created all the artwork and wrote the game scenario. The game was intended to be a " Pac-Man" inspired take-off with a free form play field instead of walls. 'What I was trying to do with Bubbles was come up with a non-violent, clean game (no pun intended)' says John Kotlarik. ![]() Both of these had very limited production runs.Įven if the title screen says 1982, Bubbles was released in May 1983.īy 1983 it seemed every possible idea had been used in a video game except the kitchen sink. * The cabaret and cocktail models were identical in design to their "Robotron - 2084" counterparts. The control panel had the same joystick that the upright model used, but the graphics on it were more detailed (cartoon images of characters from the game, as opposed to a simple design). It had a curved marquee on top that had the same graphics as the standard upright. The DuraMold Bubbles was a big blue plastic cylinder with no sideart. There were a few other DuraMold games made, but Bubbles was the most common one by far. This was an experiment in making an indestructible arcade cabinet that would last forever. * The DuraMold cabinet was a round cabinet made completely out of thick plastic. The control panel features an 8-Way optical joystick that has an incredible feel, but is prone to breakage. The marquee matches the design of the sideart perfectly (a 'Bubbles' logo on a dark blue background, some of them also showed the main character, but many of them did not). It is decorated with painted sideart of a bunch of bubbles coming up from a drain. * The standard upright is in a dark blue cabinet (which is identical to one of the alternate "Robotron - 2084" cabinets). On top of there being four different cabinets, there were also two different ROM revisions (the 'Red' and 'Blue' revisions), making a grand total of eight different Bubbles machines. All four different varieties are pretty rare. Bubbles was available in four different cabinets - A standard wooden upright cabinet, a plastic DuraMold cabinet, a mini (or cabaret) cabinet, and a cocktail.
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