Bomberman: Misobon Roulette

The medal game is a common fixture of Japanese arcades, providing a lower-stakes alternative togambling in which players can covert money to medals meant for use with these games specifically. Medals won can’t be traded for prizes or cash due to Japanese gambling laws, but they can often be banked for use in the future. Since they’ve been popular for years, plenty of major game franchises find themselves dabbling in the model sooner or later. Bomberman is, of course, no exception to this and the first medal game in the series, Misobon Roulette, was released in cooperation with Eighting and Capcom. Despite the enduring popularity of Bomberman, the series wouldn’t see another medal game until Bomberman: The Medal in 2018 under the wing of Konami, which is unsurprising considering their avid support of these kinds of games.

After putting in your medals (the more you put in, the more you can potentially earn), the game rolls an allotment of bombs and a power-up for you. Misobon Roulette makes the interesting decision to confine players to the Revenge Cart, which moves around the arena automatically. It’s up to players to time their bombs so that they’ll hopefully eliminate one or more Bombers as they run around. This is far easier said than done, though, since the Bombers are surprisingly adept at knowing when to get out of the way and they won’t be going after each other like in a normal game of Bomberman either. If you nab at least one KO, you’ll get a payout, but otherwise, you’ll be prompted to try again on a different map. There are only three environments, all taken from Super Bomberman 3, but if you cycle through them multiple times, you’ll at least get different block arrangements.

Although the physicality of the machine is an essential part of the equation, it is possible to emulate and play Misobon Roulette thanks to the efforts of user 1egato from BombermanBoard, arcade game hacker Sean Riddle, and the MAME community. On February 1^st, 2025, 1egato posted on BombermanBoard that they managed to buy the game from a listing and provided images of the game’s board and manual. After reaching out to Sean Riddle, they were able to successfully dump the game, which became playable on MAME as of March 6^th, 2025. Everything works and you can try out all of the maps, but you will have to deal with frequent errors along the way. Without the possibility of winning anything tangible, it’s not really worth more than a few minutes as a curiosity, but it’s great to have this interesting and often unknown piece of Bomberman history available nonetheless.

Links

https://www.bombermanboard.com/viewtopic.php?t=2392 – The BombermanBoard topic in which 1egato posted about their acquisition and archival of the game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaWuB–TJoo – Gameplay video

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