Bomberman 64
The first Bomberman to go 3D: Hudson Soft's 1997 N64 adventure traded the classic grid for free-roaming chaos, and the four-player couch battles were glorious or broken depending on who you asked. The single-player mode hid real depth — 100 of 120 Gold Cards to unlock the true ending — but it was the sing-song TV jingle and the rental-store ritual that cemented it in your brain.
Hudson Soft's Bomberman had been a home-console staple since the mid-80s, but the Nintendo 64 demanded something new. In September 1997, Bomberman 64 arrived in Japan as Baku Bomberman — "Explosive Bomberman" — and Nintendo published it worldwide, reaching North America that December. It was the first 3D game in the series' history, a move that felt daring and risky to a fanbase raised on tight grid-based mayhem.
The 3D shift worked best in single-player, where critics praised the adventure mode's imagination and depth: puzzle-packed worlds hiding 120 Gold Cards, with 100 needed to unlock the true ending — a genuinely demanding hunt that kept the cartridge in the console long after the credits. Four-player battle mode was where opinions split: without the flat grid, the series' surgical bomb-trap tactics loosened into scrambling, and plenty of fans decided the old way was better. You and your friends would argue about whether it was genius or broken, then play another round anyway.
What everyone agrees on is the commercial — the goofy sing-song "Bomberman" jingle that lodged itself permanently in a generation's heads. As the N64 library exploded, Bomberman 64 settled into the "that one game we rented" category: the box you grabbed at Blockbuster when Mario Kart was checked out, and a weirdly ambitious little adventure underneath.
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