A Tumble in the Jungle
As a small child with a wide-eyed interest in the natural world, I embarked on one or two trips to a place called the Tropiqaria in West Somerset. It was (and still is) a small tropical house and zoo built in and around an old BBC radio transmitter. I have two memories from visiting the Tropiquaria; one school trip during which I held a snake around my neck (they’re dry, not slimy!) and one trip with my parents where I sank a few coins into the single arcade machine that stood near the snack bar.
Over the following thirty years I would think about this game every now and then, surrounded by snakes, lizards and tropical flora as it was, but could never remember the name. It was a single-screen platformer along the lines of Bomb Jack but with a bit of a Ghostbusters vibe; the characters had vacuum guns with packs on their backs, and you’d suck up enemies into your pack and then fire them at other enemies. It was bright and colourful and whimsical, and something about it burrowed into the back of my mind and found a permanent home there.
Incredibly, by using the modern art of “Googling it” I have managed to identify this mysterious game from my youth, so I’d like to bring your attention to Tumblepop, released in 1991 and developed by Data East. Tumblepop is an arcade platformer for up to two players starring a pair of ghost hunters who travel the world, sucking up spooks and blasting them into their allies. The machine was published by Namco in Japan, a company called Leprechaun Inc. in the US, and a company called Mitchell Corporation in Europe. Despite sounding very English, the Mitchell Corporation was apparently a Japanese developer and publisher, and somehow delivered a Tumblepop cabinet to a random exhibition of tropical animals in the depths of the English West Country. Strange how things work out, isn’t it?

Thanks to the modern gift of emulation, I spent some time today playing Tumblepop on my desktop PC using a USB Nintendo Switch controller, and I have to say I had a pretty good experience with it, despite there being very few lizards nearby. The game definitely has an air of Bomb Jack about it, with its single-screen layouts and backgrounds featuring world landmarks, but the rainbow-hued suction beams of the magic vacuum guns add a whole extra dimension to the gameplay.
After selecting the nation they’d like to save from a simple world map, players will battle through a number of stages, slurping up a variety of enemies as they work their way towards a boss battle. The gameplay is simple and satisfying, and it’s not as tricky as a lot of arcade platformers, but it’s still easy to get caught out with so many enemies packed into the single-screen areas that are capable of attacking from above and below. As you progress through the stages, projectile-spewing baddies will begin to appear, as well as baddie-producing generator-type enemies that take a couple of hits to remove.
Each location has a boss waiting at the end of it, and the bosses tend to dominate the screen and represent an interesting change of pace. Despite each boss encounter having its own simple gimmick they all have the same solution; suck up their minions and empty the tank right in their enormous, ugly faces. Oh, don’t hold the suck button down for too long though, or your guy’s backpack will explode and you’ll lose a life. It’s a tragic and shameful way for a ghost hunter to go out.

As far as I can tell, Tumblepop was never ported out of the arcade with the single exception of a Game Boy version that was later released for the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console, meaning that outside of emulation there’s no way of playing Tumblepop in full, living colour – unless you want to track down what must now be an exceptionally rare and obscure arcade machine, that is. I wonder if the Tropiquaria still has theirs? Maybe I’ll go over there soon and check it out. Worst-case scenario; I get to see some turtles.