The Bubble Bobble Info Pages are what happens when fans stop being satisfied with “here are some tips” and start treating an arcade game like a machine worth documenting.
Visit the Bubble Bobble Info Pages
Compiled by Stephen Tjasink and Paul Rahme, the site collects information about Taito’s 1986 Bubble Bobble: enemies, items, hidden rooms, cheat sequences, scoring behavior, version differences, endings, and level structure.
Some of it came from playing the game over and over.
Some of it came straight out of the ROMs.
Fan research before game wikis became default infrastructure
The level pages include positions, delays, enemy counts, hurry-up timing, special-item locations, bubble speed, and other values dumped from game data. The site even carries information for levels 101 and 102 beyond the ordinary hundred-stage progression, noting that level 102 appears to be a demonstration level.
Elsewhere, the authors decode hidden messages from secret rooms, document the title-screen sequences for “Power Up,” “Original Game,” and “Super Game,” and compare behavior across arcade, PC, PlayStation, Saturn, and other versions.
The special-item pages go deeper still, tracking not only what an object does but the conditions that make it appear.
This is reverse engineering with smiley faces.
The front page says the project was an attempt to collate as much Bubble Bobble information as possible. It also openly credits other FAQs, players, and people involved with the MAME driver when information came from elsewhere.
The original front page carries a 1998 last-change date, while later updates have kept some links and details alive. Tjasink’s domain itself says its index page has been a placeholder since 1995.
That mixture is useful: an old fan reference that was not sealed in amber but was maintained just enough to remain navigable.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes specialist fan sites because they often preserved technical knowledge long before anyone thought to call it a database.
A game can be cute and still deserve a ROM dump.