Ever since I was a kid I had a weird interest in oddball bootleg NES games. I would play these, among licensed titles, on an online emulator site (remember those?) called nesbox.com. That was one of my favorite things to do online until I learned how to set an emulator up on my own. (Something I would need to learn soon, since emulator sites got nuked off the planet when Nintendo caught wind of them.)
Anyway, of course 10-year-old-me was blown away at the fact there were boobs on this website. Probably not on purpose, given that a lot of random junk was on that site that the devs probably pulled from one of those all-inclusive NES ROM sets, but pretty soon I'd stumble across Bubble Bath Babes. For those who aren't in the know, Bubble Bath Babes was an unlicensed game for the NES back in 1991. It's like Tetris meets Bust-a-Move, but there's a naked woman at the bottom and you get "rewarded" with a nude rendering of a woman with a really cheesy pick up line every two levels. Younger me, of course, was not interested in the gameplay (and not very good at it anyway) and was rather just fascinated that a naked woman was on MY computer screen in MY video game.
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| Bubble Bath Babes' gameplay |
None of this is really relevant to this post, I just think it's a funny story and at least gives some context is to how I discovered this to begin with. Anyway, my interest in bootleg games would stay in the back of my mind for years, reigniting every now and then when one would become a meme. Most recently I got back into them and started to do some real research, initially looking into the company American Video Entertainment and interviewing a few people that worked there. All of this reminded me of my interest in Bubble Bath Babes, and I got thinking... where did that game even come from? Why?
Well a quick Google search will show you that the game came from a little Taiwanese company named Paensian. It was one of three erotic games to be sold for the NES here in the states (mail-order only) and that's pretty much all the info you get. Dig a little deeper and you'll discover it was released as a child-friendly-version under the name Mermaids of Atlantis: Riddle of the Magic Bubble by American Video Entertainment. Dig even deeper and you'll find that there's another two versions of the game, one titled Soap Panic and another titled Magic Bubble. For a while I could not figure out how this jigsaw puzzle pieced together, but after some thinking and some more digging, I think I finally figured out the skeletal history of this weird little boobie-tetris.
So to start at the beginning, a small company named C&E (Computer & Entertainment, Inc.) sprung up in Taipei around 1990. Their first game, Zhan Guo Si Chuan Sheng or Sichuan Province (likely in reference to the Sichuan-style mahjong) was a simple Mahjong solitaire game that had a narrative about conquering mainland china. This was later released in the United States as Tiles of Fate. In Japan it was licensed, modified, and released by Hacker International as Idol Shisen Mahjong ("Shisen" being Japanese for Sichuan.) This version changes the narrative of conquring China to playing against an idol by having her gradually strip after each won game. C&E's second game was Magic Bubble. What I found interesting, however, is when going through every game that's officially credited under C&E, Magic Bubble is the only one that has adult content. Every other game they developed that is rumored to have adult content actually only had said adult content in the licensed Japanese releases by Hacker International, a company infamous for injecting porn in their games.
Magic Bubble stands out as C&E's only official adult game, which is a bit odd considering the rest of their catalog (which, albiet, half of which is only available via their Hacker releases) don't have adult content. Even stranger, is when going through Magic Bubble's graphics you can find a handful of unused, cartoony, fish characters.
I have a theory that Magic Bubble wasn't always going to be an adult game, but without contacting the developers- who seem to be impossible to track down- this isn't a theory that's possible to prove. The original cover art has zero adult material on it (except for the back screenshots.) However I have no idea how it's supposed to relate to the game at all.
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| The all mighty Magic Bubble god |
Anyway, in typical Hacker International fashion, the game was released in Japan with modifications under the title Soap Panic. The changes here are small, but noticeable. Surprisingly, the women that appear every two levels are exactly the same. The woman at the bottom, however, has had a little more soap removed to expose more skin (surprised?), the bezel has been changed from yellow to blue, a bubble on the title screen has been removed, and the options in the beginning of the game have also been reduced. Interestingly, Hacker also implemented a cheat code. If you pause at the beginning of a game and press up, right, down, and left. You can select the stage and level with the B and A buttons.
As for the game itself, it's actually pretty fun to play, maybe a little addicting? I'm a big Tetris fan and kind of zone out whenever I boot it up. I noticed I also get Tetris-brain whenever I boot up Magic Bubble. The nudie cutscenes are pretty meh, the style is very early 90s cheapo hentai.
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| This is not a human, that is an alien. |
Soap Panic was retitled to Bubble Bath Babes and released here in the states by a Taiwanese company called Paensian. Not much is known about Paensian other than they released two other Hacker International boobie-games here via mail-order. Neither C&E or Hacker are mentioned at all in the game which may mean these releases were never licensed from their developers. Bubble Bath Babes and Soap Panic only have two main differences; the title and the cutscenes. Instead of cheapo hentai girls, you get weird generic white women with very strange dirty talk.
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| Me and my partner theorize that Bubbling Bunny is the all mighty deity of these bathing babes. |
Meanwhile, Macronix, a chip manufacturer with a foundry up in Taiwan, was trying to get into the video game market. After asking if they could manufacture chips for Nintendo and being turned down, Macronix turned around and started American Video Entertainment. They manufactured their own cartridges with a security circuit to get around Nintendo's infamous lockout chip. A system they called the NINA chip. A handful of games that AVE rounded up to publish in the United States under their new name came from Taiwan. One of the companies that were open to licensing their games for production here just happened to be C&E. Thus, Mermaids of Atlantis: Riddle of the Magic Bubble (subtle huh?) was born. All the naked women were tossed to the wayside. That girl at the bottom? She's a mermaid now with a clamshell bra. All of those erotic screens? Now they're storybook panels about the mermaids of Atlantis fighting against the evil Emperor O-Dinten (a bastardized way to spell Nintendo backwards) and his dura-bubbles that have captured the mermaid's toys and games (a really cheeky satire on Nintendo's licensing system, confirmed by the story's own writer, Phil Mikkelson.)
Mermaids of Atlantis: Riddle of the Magic Bubble was unleashed on the world and did... okay, like most AVE games. Ratings on it during its initial release seem to be non-existent, but I'm sure they're laying around somewhere.
Funnily enough, Magic Bubble has a credit screen. They even kept this in Mermaids of Atlantis, so now we know exactly who worked on this. Unfortunately, hardly any of these people seem to be easy to locate and most of them hardly have any documented presence in the gaming sphere. Still, it's nice to have their names known.
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| I pity the woman that had to do the graphics for this. |