ABOUT
BOMBERMAN GUIDE

Bomberman Guide is an independent, fan-edited reference for the classic Bomberman game series and the wider arena-bomber genre it created. It collects history, catalogues notable games and clones, and explains the design grammar of grid-based party bombers for an audience that includes longtime fans, new players, designers studying the form, and developers building open-source descendants.

It is not a fan site that wraps itself in the Bomberman brand. It is not a wiki that aggregates every plot detail and character bio. It is an editorial publication that takes the genre seriously, writes about specific games descriptively, and treats Konami's intellectual property with appropriate distance.

§01What this guide covers

The site is organised into four sections at the moment:

• History — a 40-year timeline of the Bomberman series, from the 1980 Hudson Soft tech demo through Bakudan Otoko, the NES landmark, the Saturn peak, the Konami acquisition in 2012, and Super Bomberman R.
• Games — a catalogue of notable entries in the Bomberman series itself plus the wider arena-bomber genre, with platforms, release years, and editorial notes on why each matters.
• Clones — open-source Bomberman implementations on GitHub: browser HTML5 clones, Unity tutorial projects, Python pygame versions, and the repos worth knowing about. Includes a legal-posture explainer on clones vs ports.
• About — this page.

Additional sections (Strategy fundamentals, Maps and arena design) are planned. They are not yet published. When they exist, they will appear in the navigation.

§02Editorial position

The guide writes about Bomberman descriptively — meaning we discuss specific games, mechanics, designers, and history as factual subjects, the same way a film publication writes about a particular director's work. We do not claim affiliation with Konami, do not borrow Bomberman branding for the site's own identity, and do not present ourselves as an official information source.

Where we describe in-game items, characters, or mechanics from specific Bomberman titles, we do so as critical commentary and historical analysis — defensible categories under fair-use precedent in most jurisdictions, the same posture Wikipedia takes when it documents the franchise. We avoid using copyrighted screenshots, music, or character art as decoration; where we embed game screenshots, we credit the source and use them in service of editorial commentary.

This is the difference between writing about Bomberman and pretending to be a Bomberman product. We do the first deliberately. We never do the second.

§03Trademark and legal

Bomberman is a registered trademark of Konami Corporation. Konami owns the brand, the character designs, the wordmark, the music, and the original game code. This site has no business relationship with Konami, no sponsorship, and no endorsement from them. We are not authorised to speak for them.

Every page of this site carries an educational-purposes notice in its footer. That notice exists because the site is built on the legal foundation that commentary, criticism, history, and educational analysis of copyrighted and trademarked subjects is a recognised fair-use category, separate from competing commercial uses. The notice is honest disclosure: we are doing commentary and history, not promotion or merchandising.

If you are a rights-holder and believe content on this site exceeds fair-use bounds, please email hello@bombermanguide.com and we will review it.

§04Maintenance and contributions

The guide is currently maintained by a small independent editorial team. Content is published on no fixed schedule — new entries appear when an editor has the time and energy to write them properly. There is no algorithm-driven publication pipeline, no SEO content farm behind this, and no commercial sponsor influencing what gets covered.

If you have a correction, a missing game we should know about, a new clone worth listing, or a piece of Bomberman history we got wrong, please email hello@bombermanguide.com. Reader corrections are how the guide stays accurate.

§05License and reuse

The original editorial writing on this site is published under a permissive Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted) — you are welcome to quote, link, translate, or build on it, provided you credit Bomberman Guide and share derivative work under the same license. The pixel-art icons used on the site are original work by this guide's contributors and are released under the same license.

Embedded screenshots, cover art, and other third-party media remain the property of their original rights-holders and are reproduced here under fair-use editorial commentary. Those images are not covered by our license; reuse of them is governed by the rights-holders.