Bomb Jack on C16/Plus 4: A Dad Filter Return to 1986

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What It Is

Bomb Jack is an arcade platformer released by Tehkan (the company that later became Tecmo) in March 1984. You play Jack, a blue-and-red caped superhero-ish figure, jumping around five looping screens set against famous world landmarks — the pyramids, the Acropolis, a castle, a cityscape — collecting 24 bombs per screen while dodging enemy birds and mummies that occasionally transform into flying saucers. The bombs light in sequence; collecting them in the lit order pushes the bonus meter up. Finish a screen with enough lit bombs collected and you earn a large bonus. That is the whole game. It loops. It does not end. You are playing for a score.

The home conversions were published by Elite Systems in 1986 across the UK’s entire 8-bit computer lineup — Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC, and the less-loved Commodore 16 and Plus/4 editions this review is concerned with. The C16 version has a smaller colour palette than the C64 version, cruder sprite animation, and a characteristic chunky look. It is, in the strict sense, the lesser port. It is also the port that landed in more British Christmas boxes in 1986 than anyone involved at Commodore would probably like to admit, because the C16 was cheap, and parents bought cheap. The full-format game topped the UK all-format charts in April 1986.

Why This One Matters To Me

The C16 was not my computer. It was in the house, plugged into a small TV in the kitchen, because Commodore had priced it as the entry-level option and my parents had calibrated Christmas budgets accordingly. It had 16K of memory, a chunky brown keyboard, and a tape deck that groaned its way through ten-minute loads to play something that would then crash. If you were a kid in the UK in 1986 and you had a C16, you were simultaneously proud you had a computer and quietly aware your mate down the road had a C64 that did everything better.

Bomb Jack was one of the cassettes in the box. I cannot remember how it got there — an aunt, a cousin, a bundle deal at Woolworths — but I remember it working. It worked the way all the best arcade conversions worked. You knew what to do inside fifteen seconds. Jack jumps, Jack glides, Jack collects. You die when you touch a mummy. You die a lot. You do not mind dying because death takes two seconds, and then you are back at the start, trying to remember which bomb was lit first this time.

Playing it now, forty years later, is a peculiar experience. The game is unchanged. The graphics are exactly as chunky as they were. Jack still glides with that slightly floaty physics that made the arcade original feel so forgiving. What has changed is everything around it — the idea that a game could end, that it could have cutscenes, that you might unlock cosmetics, that there could be a sequel hook. Bomb Jack has none of that. It is a score, a clock, and twenty-four bombs. And it is astonishing how much game that turns out to be.

My boys watched me play for about five minutes. The ten-year-old asked what the point was. The seven-year-old asked if you could shoot the birds. Both wandered off. Fine. This is not a family game. This is an archaeological dig to a time when an arcade platformer was considered a complete proposition, before designers felt the need to add layers on top of the core loop to justify a £60 price tag. There is something bracing about that simplicity.

The Dad Filter

Worth Full Price?

Buy Cheap. A boxed C16 copy of Bomb Jack on eBay is three to eight pounds. Disc-only is less. There is no meaningful “full price” for a cassette game from 1986. The question is whether it is worth the small amount it costs, and the answer is unambiguously yes — if you have either a working C16 or an emulator that can handle.TAP or.PRG files.

If you have neither, the cost-benefit shifts. You can emulate the C16 on a modern Mac or PC in ten minutes with VICE, and that is the route I would suggest. The whole experience — finding the tape image, loading it, hearing the cassette sound effect, seeing Jack glide across the pyramid — is genuinely transporting. It is the cheapest form of time travel currently on the market.

Kid Appeal

Higher than you might expect. Kids who have grown up on Fortnite and Roblox can look at Bomb Jack and see the skeleton of a game they actually understand. Jump, avoid the enemy, grab the thing, score. It is an arcade at its most elemental. My seven-year-old, after initially dismissing it as “weird graphics”, did come back ten minutes later to ask if he could have a go. He got it immediately. That is the mark of a well-designed game — the rules teach themselves in seconds.

Where it loses them is the repetition. After four or five screens, with no narrative progression, no new enemies to learn, and no unlocks, modern kids will lose interest. This is not a game built for their attention economy. But they will have enjoyed ten minutes and seen what video games looked like before they existed. That is worth something.

Parent Tolerance

Medium. The arcade loop is tight and satisfying in short bursts. There is real joy in chaining lit-bomb collections for bonus multipliers. The music loops, and the music is the kind of chiptune earworm that will follow you to bed.

But fatigue hits. This is a game designed for arcade sessions of 3 to 5 minutes, not home sessions of 1 hour. Push past twenty minutes, and you will feel the limits of the five-screen loop. The C16’s chunky sprites do not age as gracefully as the Spectrum’s pixel-art version, either. It is a fifteen-minute game that is often played.

Family Play Value

Hot-seat. Bomb Jack is a single-player game. There is no split-screen, no co-op, no online. But the scoring system lends itself naturally to hot-seat competition — take turns, compare high scores, laugh at each other’s deaths. This is how the game was actually played in 1986 by three kids crowded around one TV.

My ten-year-old grasped this within about two minutes. “Can I try?” is actually a family gaming interaction, even if only one controller is active. It works best with two people. Beyond that, it becomes a spectator sport, which the C16 era was perfectly comfortable with.

Time Respect

Excellent. This is where Bomb Jack almost wins on its own merits. There is no opening cutscene. There is no tutorial. There is no save file. You press a button, Jack appears, and you play. You die — which will happen within thirty seconds — and you press a button, and Jack reappears. There is no progression to protect, no quest to abandon, no reason not to switch it off mid-game.

Put more directly: this is a game you can play for four minutes and feel like you have had a complete experience. For a dad with fifteen minutes between bath time and story time, that is a gift. Modern games, for all their ambition, almost never respect your time this cleanly.

Replay Chances

High, for the right kind of player. If you are the sort of person who enjoys slowly nudging a high score up by a thousand points at a time, Bomb Jack has infinite replay value. That is literally its business model. If you need narrative closure or visible progression, it has none.

For a dad picking it up on a wet Sunday evening to remember 1986 for twenty minutes, it is perfect. You will come back to it next month, and the month after. You will not tire of it, because there is nothing to tire of — no story thread, no unlocked content you have seen, nothing to complete. It just is.

The Verdict

Buy Cheap. Bomb Jack on the Commodore 16 is not a game you play because it is the best version. The C64 version is better. The arcade is better still. You play the C16 version because you had a C16 as a kid, or because your mate did, or because you are curious what the cheap-Christmas-computer option looked like. It is a specific nostalgia hit for a specific demographic, and it costs almost nothing to scratch.

What surprised me on returning to it was how well the core loop holds up. Jack glides, bombs light, the meter ticks. For all the intervening decades of design innovation, most modern games would kill to have a loop this immediately legible. That is the gift of a 1984 arcade design — nothing extraneous, everything purposeful.

Not a family game in the conventional sense. But an excellent family artifact — a quick demonstration to your kids of what their grandparents bought for their own kids, forty years ago, because it cost less than a C64. Show them the tape loading screen. Let them hear the music. Let them see Jack glide. Then let them wander back to Fortnite. That is how you hand down a piece of gaming history.

Related Reviews

• V-Rally ’97 — Dad Review — another nostalgia-first review, covering the PS1 rally game I owned a decade after Bomb Jack.
• TurboGeek Gaming Hub — every review, guide, and parent resource in one place.
• The Dad Filter Manifesto — how and why I review games as a dad, not a gamer.