Bomb Bee was the sequel to Namco’s pinball-breakout hybrid Gee Bee, and is so similar that if we were covering the first in the series we probably wouldn’t be talking about this one. However, while Gee Bee was released to US arcades, Bomb Bee never was.
Bomb Bee sees a a greater use of color than its predecessor. Of greater historical note is that it was the first collaboration between Namco and Nintendo. The latter company licensed a version of the game for its own arcade hardware.
Both Bomb Bee and its predecessor are also noteworthy as early creations of Touru Iwatani, better known for later creating the far more popular game Pac Man. Iwatani joined Namco to work on pinball titles, but they’d assigned him to design video games instead. These hybrid games were his compromise.
Okay, enough preamble, onto the game itself.
While it’s easy to see what Iwatani was going for here, it’s easy to see why neither Bomb Bee nor its predecessor were the hits Namco wanted. The game provides one of the more interesting layouts for a paddle-based breakout game. Pinball configurations that wouldn’t be possible on a physical table.
On the other hand paddle games had been around for nearly a decade. Breakout had been out for two years. With the advent of Space Invaders the year before, video game players had shown that they were ready to move on to new kinds of game. Fans of pinball had real tables to turn to.
I personally found Bomb Bee’s paddles inconveniently small, though that may in fact be a reflection of my skills. Taking all the above into account, I’ll give Bomb Bee a C rating. It’s of average quality for the era of its release.
