Historical Context
Hudson Soft in 1994 was the friend who insists on bringing fireworks to every barbecue (polite decline not accepted). The first Super Bomberman (1993) had rocked living rooms by proving two outrageous theses: A) maze-based action could anchor a console’s multiplayer scene, and B) gamers would absolutely nag parents for a plastic octopus called a Multitap. Internally, Hudson had staffed the in-house team Produce! as a dedicated Bombermen mill; their mandate for the follow-up was “keep everything that works, trim everything that drags, and spend the leftover ROM budget on character art that would melt a ‘90s inkjet.” Outside Hudson’s Hokkaidō HQ, the genre landscape was ballistic. Street Fighter II’s Champion Edition occupied more rental slots than actual chairs in some towns, Mortal Kombat had just taught the ESRB to conjugate “decapitate,” and Rare’s SNES tech demos were flexing on Sega’s ad department hourly.
Against that roar stood Bomberman, quietly confident, grid-bound, the anti-mascot mascot. Where competitors hurled parallax layers, Bomberman kept a top-down view closer to Ms. Pac-Man, embracing deliberate pace over twitchy sweep-kicks. Hudson doubled down on four-player social chaos, a pivot so committed that Nintendo of America bundled Super Bomberman 2 and the Super Multitap together in marketing art, essentially saying: “If you own only one peripheral this year, make sure it looks like a tiny purple bone.”
I discovered SB2 not in a traditional arcade but at a local roller rink’s import kiosk, complete with Japanese Super Famicom and box art so neon it might have been visible from low orbit. The kiosk owner refused to rotate carts, quote, “until someone beats Plasma Bomber without continues.” Challenge accepted. (I was eleven. It took two months. Worth it.) Only later did Internet archaeology reveal that same kiosk build was final retail; no secret two-player story code ever hid inside. Turns out the myth of a “lost co-op campaign” survives only on late-‘90s message boards and one confused Tips & Tricks letter. Collectors who still believe are politely invited to upload their prototypes for science.
In Hudson’s internal chronology SB2 is the middle child: not the brand-defining shot across Nintendo’s bow that SB1 represented, and not the feature-bursting menagerie of SB3, which introduced Louies and color-coded elemental power-ups. Instead SB2 sharpened the blade. Smaller ROM than SB3, tighter art, zero dinosaurs, zero padded modes. Think Empire Strikes Back but with more land mines and no parental revelations. The antagonists are five color-themed commanders collectively dubbed the Five Dastardly Bombers—Magnet, Golem, Pretty, Brain, Plasma, each arriving with an on-brand combat gimmick and a proud 16-bit voice clip that lands somewhere between “karaoke microphone in a tin can” and “actual cartoon evil laugh.”
The era’s peripheral war played out in advertising pages: Sega responded to Hudson’s four-port bravado by releasing the Team Player multitap for Genesis and even ran copycat Bomberman-like ads for Gauntlet IV co-op. Yet ask any playground kid of the time what Friday-night sleepovers revolved around and you will hear the same litany: pizza, Surge, Bomberman battles, optional Beavis and Butt-Head quotes. Bomberman wasn’t an also-ran; it was the social equalizer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEIunVvLHYU
Mechanics
On paper SB2 repeats classic formula: drop bombs, make corridors, collect upgrades, outwit enemies who navigate like caffeinated Roombas. In micro-detail the sequel adjusts almost every system tooth. Enemy AI for grunts now flips from simple patrol loops to conditional aggression; once you hit Fire power 2, some critters actively flee blasts. Range increments per Fire icon got standardized (earlier entries used inconsistent growth curves), making distance math muscle-memorizable. And bosses? They received playbook overhauls that still raise eyebrows in GDQ speedrun commentary.
Magnet Bomber occupies World 1. His arena contains magnet pillars that cycle polarity. His gimmick is not “reflecting” bombs, as some misremember, but vacuuming them in straight lines toward himself whenever they pass within four tiles. Mastering spacing on that pull is the first true skill gate. Golem Bomber is second: he plods, but the plod is deceptive because each footstep spawns debris acting as portable walls. He effectively sculpts terrain in real time, a concept modern roguelikes still steal. Third is Pretty Bomber, who weaponizes heart-trail projectiles that home fast enough to make Gradius III seekers blush. Brain Bomber teleports at semi-random quadrants and drops red mines; veterans memorize the pixel puddle to chain remote bombs through his warp exit. The fifth commander, Plasma Bomber, births tornado shields that ricochet your ordnance and his own back at double speed. Boss AI in SNES memory footprint impresses, especially considering they share code segments.
The single-player structure splits into five themed worlds, eight stages each (including mid-boss at Stage 4 and the Dastardly centerpiece at Stage 8). Stages 1-7 are traditional maze clears: eliminate every roaming foe, locate exit, profit. Stage 8 flips to a multi-screen gimmick culminating in the commander’s humanoid phase then mecha phase. Golem’s mecha fills half the screen and can only be damaged by popping bombs into specific catapult tiles,make one mistake and you feed his hit-points, not yours.
Now, power-ups. Fire raises blast radius one square per icon. Bomb adds one extra deployable at a time up to eight. Speed increments foot-speed. The Power Glove, important correction, debuted in Super Bomberman (1993) but returns here refined. In SB1 the throw arc was slow and limited to one direction; SB2 accelerates the animation and liberalizes horizontal plus vertical aim, letting advanced players juggle bombs over walls like volleyballs. The Kick icon (blue boot) is its own pick-up, never unlocked by punching blocks; once obtained, the B button shunts any adjacent bomb along the grid until it collides with a wall or character. Add both Glove and Kick and you can drop, kick, then dash forward, snatch, and fastball special the same bomb, Bomber micro two years before StarCraft taught competitive clicking. Remote Control returns, giving detonation on button press, though the item is purposely rare to avoid trivializing puzzles. Wall Pass, Bomb Pass, and full-protect Heart round out the normal kit. SB2 excludes Louies, the rideable kangaroo-like mounts appear in PC-Engine’s Bomberman ’94 and consolewide in Super Bomberman 3. Anyone claiming to have ridden a Louie in SB2 probably rented the wrong cart or conflated childhood memories.
The password system is four numerals displayed after every cleared world. 1111 starts World 1 with six bombs, six fire, glove, kick, remote. Guides codify it as full power demo; no other SNES Bomberman has a code so short for so much. Because rental stores never bothered wiping battery RAM between weekends, kids would peel stickers off the cart top and scribble 1111 right there, saving endless re-grinds. GameFAQs’ oldest archive cites the code in 1999; printed magazines in 1994 listed it too. Urban legends added “6000 unlocks co-op,” but data miners confirm password space maps directly to bit-flags for power levels, not secret modes.
Multiplayer Battle is the honey trap. Up to four players (five in Super Famicom thanks to Hudson’s second controller port on the baseline console; Western SNES needed the Multitap) free-for-all across specially designed maps: standard box, conveyor belts, arrow tiles, arrow tiles with speed boosters, and the always-popular Random Graveyard where soft blocks occasionally move. Each battle has two parameters: player stock (1-5 lives) and sudden-death timer (45 seconds default). When the timer expires, indestructible blocks tumble from sky at pseudo-random coordinates, funneling survivors into claustrophobic kill boxes. No Louies means every victory is footwork, not mount RNG. The portrait cut-ins for winners, newly redrawn with extra frames, practically scream “animated GIF” a decade early.
For context seekers: academic game-studies papers love pointing to SB2’s battle mode as an early case study in emergent sportsmanship. Because bomb kicks can stun and bombs can chain to kill their owner in delayed suicides, the game punishes aggression that forgets geometry. Modern watchers jokingly liken it to Rocket League: simple controls, conceptual clarity, but enormous skill ceiling.
Legacy and Influence
Super Bomberman 2’s legacy operates on two axes: mechanical lineage and character canon. Mechanically, SB2 locked in the throw-kick Remote Control trinity that became default loadout in Saturn Bomberman (1996) and again in Bomberman Live (2007). Developers at Nintendo EPD explicitly cited Bomberman’s territory denial when discussing Splatoon’s early prototypes; in roundtables archived by Game Developer magazine, a designer mentions “grid control through hazard placement” as inspirational. Indie roguelikes like Spelunky let you pick up bombs after dropping specifically because Derek Yu studied SB2’s pick-up animation in emulators (confirmed in 2012 TIGSource AMA).
Character canon is even simpler: the Five Dastardly Bombers keep returning. Crystal levels of Bomberman Fantasy Race build logos around Pretty Bomber. Hudson’s weird 2017 pachislot spinoff Bombergirl renders Magnet Bomber in a diesel-mech suit. Konami’s Super Bomberman R 2 (2023) re-imagines Plasma Bomber’s tornado shield as an RTS special move. Without SB2 these mascots might have stayed one-shot villains like Dr. Wily’s mid-boss robots; instead they became the franchise’s Koopa Kids.
Yet, ironically, SB2 isn’t the entry casual retro fans name first. The primary reason is timing: it dropped in Japan in April 1994, United States in December, wedged between Super Metroid and Final Fantasy III (VI). Magazine page counts were finite. EGM dedicated eight spreads to Square’s opera scene but gave Bomberman a two-column preview. Plenty of players therefore skipped SB2 and met the series later via SB3 or SB4. That gap created a mini-cult who insists SB2 is “the pure one,” the non-gimmick edition. Ask a speedrunner and they will praise SB2’s clean RNG tables for enemy spawns. Ask a board-game designer and they will note SB2’s grid has exactly 64 destructible soft blocks in Stage 1, same as a chess board, coincidence maybe, design elegance definitely.
Why did SB2 drop co-op campaign? Interviews with director Shigeki Fujiwara (translated on BombermanWiki) state the team poured resources into smarter AI and bigger bosses and could not maintain frame rate with two player objects plus boss sprites. Rather than ship a compromised mode they axed it. Some fans felt slighted; others accepted trade-off as necessary. Hindsight suggests they chose correctly because battle mode remained the friends-forever pillar.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Super Bomberman 2 is the SNES cartridge equivalent of that friend who always predicts pizza orders correctly then pays tip unprompted. Nearly every design choice lands: stages escalate but never feel unfair, the throw-kick loop sets off tiny dopamine fireworks, bosses test pattern reading without veering into bullet-hell cruelty, and the victory jingle ages like an 8-bit wine in a cellar full of concussed Smurfs. Minor blemishes exist. The absent co-op still stings when younger siblings beg to tag along. Brain Bomber’s teleport randomly scuffs speedrun splits and can soft-lock perfectionists. And the gallery music loop is short enough that grinding passwords for PB attempts might drive you to mute. But weigh those nits against the moment-to-moment sensation of threading a kicked bomb between three soft blocks and tagging an opponent by one pixel, and the calculus explodes in SB2’s favor.
Final score: 9.0 / 10. Missing co-op keeps it one tick below nirvana, yet if you own a Super Multitap and three controllers still functioning, SB2 turns any living room into a temporary coliseum. Just remember: when someone smugly asks for tips, whisper “one one one one” and watch their face. Then, while they’re busy feeling clever, toss a Power-Glove fastball right between their boots.