It was a sunny day. As usual, Mr. Mitsuji went out of his house and moved towards his workplace. All he had to do was to cross the door leading to his office before 9 o'clock, then spend the whole day (and often night) there.
He was an ideas inventor, but he had no ideas at that time... He spent lots of hours without finding a good idea to take into consideration. Then came breaktime, and he went for a walk through the park near his workplace. Few children played and shouted happily, and got his attention. He observed them.
Kids were playing peek-a-boo, running one after the other and holding some small colourful plastic cylinders. By unscrewing it, a small stick was released with a ring on the top of it. By blowing into the ring, small soap bubbles came out, and kids were playing a battle with them... a quite commog game after all.
Mitsuji approached them. A peculiar large, spherical bubble took his attention, floating in air, shining with all the colours of a rainbow. Such perfection suddenly came into contact with a bug, who was calmly flying there, and made the bubble explode with a tiny explosion of soap. The bug fell down and stood there, stunned, then took off again and kept on travelling. Mitsugi was surprised and... he got an idea all of a sudden! He ran to his office and noted all he saw: kids, bubbles, the bug. These words had little to spare one another, but became a saucerful of ideas, then combined together in a superb product.

Mitsuji was employed at Taito Corporation, a world famous videogame manufacturer. Starting with those notes, he developed a plot for his next videogame: children throwing bubbles and trying to entrap bugs into them. He then thought: "What if the bug in the park didn't take off quickly? He could even be accidentaly crushed!". This meditation took him to add one more feature to his idea: trapped bugs could be crushed before taking off again. He presented his ideas to the producers, and two programmers were placed to team with him: Fujisue and Nishiyori - two really odd persons, though being great programmers! They changed the bugs in new, more liking characters, as suggested by Mitsuji, then studied a manner to make gameplay funnier: bubbles could entrap enemies for a few seconds only, and dragons had to burst bubbles before enemies could set them free, transforming them into items to collect.
Now it was the time to think about the aim of the game... Mitsuji decided the kids had to set their girlfriends free, since they had been kidnapped by an evil guy and hidden in an almost unacessible underground cavern. But that wasn't enough to him... there had to be some curse on children... "We need a curse, that's it!" he said.
They thought all about that, then Nishiyori said: "What if we transform those children in some sort of prehistoric animals, and let them seek for the antidote to make them come back to normality?". Mitsuji approved: "Throwing bubbles dinosaurs? Why not? Great idea!". So the programming phase begun...
It was August 1986 when the game was finally published. The chosen name was Bubble Bobble, a crossing between the words "bubble" and the name of the heroes: Bub and Bob. The game got an incredible success and had also lots of sequels. The first one was Rainbow Islands: Bub and Bob now look like common children, and the shining colours of soap bubbles now appear in rainbows, used as weapons... but that's another story!