Developer: Actual Entertainment
Publisher: Actual Entertainment
Year: 1997
Genre: Arcade

If you follow me on social media, you’ve probably seen me making plenty of goofy posts about the 1997[1] puzzle game Gubble. It would be easy to assume that someone posting about an obscure and goofy looking computer game character is making fun of the game and either never played it or didn’t enjoy it very much. Folks, I am here to tell you that Gubble is good.

In Gubble you play as Gubble D. Gleep, a purple alien who finds that space pirates have invaded your planet Rennigar, fastened zymbots (the game’s levels) to the planet’s surface, and now you must remove them. Each level has you running through a maze, removing all the screws put in the floor of the maze while avoiding the level’s enemies. The screws come in different shapes, requiring you to switch between the tools that have been placed in the level. This gives Gubble a puzzle game-like element and helps add variety to all the mazes you’ll be going through.

In the original Gubble, the only way to heal was to find a health powerup or to save, and saves were consumables. There were typically 3-4 located in a world and they would disappear after you saved. In the 2020 release on Steam they are no longer consumable and you can repeatedly use the save points anytime you want. In my opinion this is a drastic improvement over the original game. There’s an argument people have made in some Steam reviews that this makes the game too easy but give me a break. No one is forcing you to save. If you want to only save a few times in each area, knock yourself out. I think it’s great when a game allows you to save anytime you want and either save yourself the time from not having to play the same parts repeatedly, and just letting me leave a game anytime I want since I have three kids and sometimes have to drop everything to go do something. Gubble 2020 gets it.

Some levels also feature hidden mini levels in them too, where you run around on the board and try to grab as many objects as possible for points. I suppose this is maybe interesting if you’re trying to get the highest score possible but most people won’t care.

Gubble was designed by Franz Lanzinger, who is probably more famous for the 1983 arcade game Crystal Castles. Crystal Castles plays very similar to this and it’s interesting to me that he’s been iterating this design for decades though Crystal Castles and the Gubble franchise. Gubble must have done well because it was followed by a Gubble 2 (Wikipedia says 1998, MobyGames says 1999), where the new feature was that Gubble could walk. Gubble walking is an affront to God but I’ll save that for another post. But the world must have agreed because in 2000 we got Gubble Buggy Racer (MobyGames says 2001), a kart racing spinoff, which I guess is an interesting direction to take a puzzle game franchise. Gubble HD came out in 2007 on PC and later for iPad. This version is very similar to the one on Steam.

There were a few attempts to make new games in the franchise after this. In 2012 there was a Kickstarter to fund a Gubble 3D but this only hit $1,249 of the $80,000 goal. In 2014 there was an attempt to make an endless runner for Android and iOS called Gubble Vacation Rush. This one looks like it came very close to release, because you can pull up videos on YouTube of the game being played at conventions and the designer saying that it should come out in a few months, which never happened. In 2020 there was a remaster of Gubble 2 announced, but it presumably never happened because God does not want Gubble to walk and struck it down.

Overall Gubble is just a solid little arcade game. It’s kind of a meme game at this point because of the creature’s design and the Game Grumps folks angrily yelling “It’s fucking Gubble!” in one of their videos. Let me just say this, fuck Game Grumps. What, you’re going to listen to adult men who will forever be trapped acting like they’re teenagers, because that’s what their fan base expects? It’s fucking Gubble? Yeah, that’s what I yell with joy whenever I see this guy.

The rerelease of Gubble is available on Steam.

[1]: MobyGames and the Steam page of the rerelease lists the release as 1996 but Wikipedia points to this press release and I found this interview which points to 1997. Both happened close to release so I’m going with those. Gubble.com also states it is 1997. The Playstation 1 release seems to be 1998. As you noticed earlier in the post, MobyGames and Wikipedia also disagree on later entries in the series so I’m not sure what’s going on.