Bubble Bobble is an arcade action platform video game developed and published by Taito.  Released in September 1986 Taito handled the Japanese distribution of the arcade cabinets while licensing the title to Romstar for North American distribution and Electrocoin for European distribution.

The game was designed by newly hired Fukio Mitsuji when he joined Taito in 1986.   Mitsuji felt that Taito’s recent arcade games were lacking when compared to other developers’ games such as Namco.  He wanted to design a new style game that would be fun to play and also rejuvenate the company’s presence in the industry.   Looking to expand their demographic appeal he wanted his game to appeal to women, specifically couples that visited arcades.   With this in mind he decided to make the game heavily focused on its two-player co-operative mode.  While building the game’s core mechanics he decided to use bubbles as the primary method to defeat enemies believing that bubbles would be a fun element that girls would enjoy.

The game places players in control of brothers Bub and Bob who have been transformed into dragons.  Super Drunk has kidnapped the brother’s girlfriends and turned them into dragons.  In order to transform back into humans and rescue their girlfriends Bub and Bob must enter the mysterious cave of monsters and complete all 100 levels.

In each level players must defeat each enemy by trapping them in bubbles then popping the bubble with the trapped enemy.  Once the bubble is popped the enemy is turned into bonus items which can be collected after they land on the ground.  In the 100^th level players face Super Drunk in a boss battle to complete the game and successfully rescue their girlfriends.  The development team incorporated three separate endings into the game, making Bubble Bobble one of the first games to contain multiple endings.