This is all the context an early ’80s arcade game really needs, to be fair, but when Data East and Vic Tokai came to port the game to Famicom and NES in 1986 - renaming it Buggy Popper for its Japanese release, and returning to Mattel’s Bump ‘n’ Jump moniker for the Western NES version - it expanded on the original formula in quite a few ways. (Also, pro-tip: you get 50,000 bonus points if you finish a level without destroying any other cars… not as easy as it might sound!) The original arcade version of Burnin’ Rubber from 1982 (and Mattel’s subsequent ports to Atari 2600, Intellivision and ColecoVision over the next couple of years, where it was renamed Bump ‘n’ Jump) was a simplistic affair that didn’t make any real effort to contextualise what was going on: you have a car, you drive fast, you get points for destroying other cars, either by jumping on them or ramming into the sides of the road. It’s a top down racer that predates Bally Midway’s better-known classic of the genre Spy Hunter by a full year, and you can play an official modern rerelease of the NES version right now on the Evercade retro gaming handheld as part of its third cartridge, Data East Collection 1. Let’s take a closer look!
One fine example is Burnin’ Rubber, which is also known, depending on where you are in the world and what platform you played it on, as either Bump ‘n’ Jump or Buggy Popper.
Data East may be a slightly lesser-known company than the big hitters of the 8- and 16-bit era, but they still put out some cracking arcade games during this period, many of which got home ports.
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