The crowd watching below burst into laughter.
The second round began quickly. David had learned his lesson; he started by looking for a dinosaur. He blew up a few soft blocks and got a purple dinosaur egg. The purple dragon hatched, and David rode it. The purple dragon's detection skill activated, and the soft blocks on the screen hiding items began to glimmer with a faint light. David headed straight for his targets and picked up the "Penetration Bomb" and "Max Firepower" items. Now, his bomb's flames could ignore obstacles and burn straight through an entire line.
On the other side, Paul was riding a blue dragon, triumphantly kicking away other people's bombs. David timed it perfectly and placed a Penetration Bomb on Paul's inevitable path. Just as Paul was about to kick it, the bomb detonated. A long flame pierced through two walls in between, burning Paul and his dragon to ashes. "Nice shot!" David laughed out loud. The game entered the endgame. Only David and a Japanese guy were left on the field.
The Japanese guy had picked up a "Rubber Bomb," which bounced around the field erratically after being thrown. Unable to dodge in time, David was caught in a pincer attack between his own Penetration Bomb and the incoming Rubber Bomb, and regretfully lost. In just ten minutes, the two rounds of the game were over.
No complex button combinations, no obscure systems. Just pure chaos, joy, and backstabbing. The turnover rate was incredibly high. Groups of reporters and players took turns to try it out. The long line in front of the booth even blocked the aisle.
"So much fun," David said, stepping aside with lingering excitement. "This game is a total party killer. It releases in July? I'll need to go buy a multitap." "Hudson is clever," Paul said, taking notes. "Many game companies are racing to push 3D, yet Hudson is filling a market gap with this ultimate 2D party game. Ten-player matches—that gimmick alone is enough to attract casual gamers."
Laughter erupted repeatedly from the crowd. Curses in different languages mingled together. A game that required no complex text translation broke through language barriers with the most intuitive of rules. At the demo station, a dozen black controller cords tangled and crisscrossed like octopus tentacles, connecting ten differently colored Bombermen on the screen.
On the side of the booth, a temporary VIP observation area built from scaffolding offered an excellent view. Hisao Oguchi gripped the railing with both hands, looking down at the bustling crowd below. Hudson Vice President Shinichi Nakamoto stood beside him, holding a cup of tea that had long since gone cold.
"On the first day of Media Day, to be able to pack the aisles of the West Hall until they're completely jammed—Mr. Nakamoto, you've staged a beautiful comeback," commented Hisao Oguchi.
Shinichi Nakamoto took a sip of his tea.
"Thanks to Sega's booth for driving the traffic. Square whetted everyone's appetite with their four-disc set in the morning, and we served up a refreshing side dish in the afternoon."
The two men watched a group of ten people gathered around a Jupiter console.
Two six-way splitters were plugged into the front ports of the console, and the ten players were crammed together, their bodies swaying back and forth as their in-game characters moved.
"At first, I was worried that bringing a 2D game to an event like E3 would get us mocked by the media, who are all hyping up 3D games," Nakamoto admitted. "After all, given the current trend, if you don't have some 3D gimmick, you're almost embarrassed to hold a press conference."
"Gamers aren't stupid, and the media is even sharper," Oguchi said, pointing to a French reporter below who was laughing uncontrollably. "Graphics are just the foot in the door; the core is still the mechanics and the fun the game itself provides. Ten people huddled around one screen, scheming against each other—that kind of pure social attribute is something big 3D titles just can't provide."
Shinichi Nakamoto recalled the debates from the early stages of development.
"When Shigeki Fujiwara submitted the proposal, there was strong opposition within the company. Some said that five-player battles on the SFC were already the limit, and that having ten people on the same screen would make it a jumbled mess, with characters too small to see. Some executives even thought it was a waste of Jupiter's capabilities.
" "How did you solve that?" asked Hisao Oguchi. "Ultrawide aspect ratio, combined with a high-contrast color design. We abandoned complex background textures and used all the system's processing power for the sprites and explosion collision detection on screen. Jupiter's 2D processing capabilities were a huge help. Even with the whole screen full of bomb flames, there was no slowdown," Shinichi Nakamoto said, setting down his teacup.
"To be honest, being able to let ten players input commands on the same machine without latency is largely thanks to the underlying controller driver code provided by Sega. The high polling rate of each port guaranteed the responsiveness."
Hisao Oguchi nodded. Sega's open attitude toward its underlying hardware was exactly what was needed to attract visionary third-party developers like Hudson. The conversation naturally shifted to another shelved proposal. "Actually, Fujiwara's initial ambition went beyond that," Shinichi Nakamoto said, lowering his voice. "At the end of last year, the development team submitted a proposal for an add-on component."
Hisao Oguchi turned his head. "Remote online multiplayer via an external modem," Shinichi Nakamoto uttered the term. Hisao Oguchi laughed. "The project that Executive Director Nakayama personally shot down?" "Yes," Shinichi Nakamoto sighed.
"The development team didn't understand at the time. The Internet was taking off in North America, and some people had already started working on LAN multiplayer. Fujiwara felt that if we could implement dial-up network multiplayer on the Jupiter, it would be a pioneering achievement that would go down in history. But when the proposal was submitted to Sega Headquarters, it was rejected by Executive Director Nakayama in less than three days."
Hisao Oguchi stopped smiling, his tone becoming serious. "Executive Director Nakayama called several of us department heads into the conference room at the time and specifically used your project as a negative example." Shinichi Nakamoto was a bit surprised. "His exact words were, 'At a time when online gaming technology is immature, do not add excessive trade-off worries and heavy technical burdens to the developers.'" Hisao Oguchi recounted the scene.
"But this represents the future," Shinichi Nakamoto argued. "But not the future of the present. Executive Director Nakayama did the math for us. In 1996, Japan's network environment had low dial-up penetration, high costs, and pitifully narrow bandwidth. Even more fatal is the latency." Hisao Oguchi pointed to the screen below.
"Just think about it. With today's dial-up networks, how high is the packet loss rate? The underlying logic of Bomberman is based on frame synchronization. Once a packet is lost, Player A sees themselves dodge a bomb, but on Player B's screen, A gets blown up. This data desynchronization will lead to endless arguments.
To mask these network flaws, your programmers have to write complex prediction algorithms and rollback code. This effectively turns a simple party game into a network engineering disaster, slowing down the entire project's development and exponentially increasing testing costs." Shinichi Nakamoto fell silent.
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