🌈 Rainbow Islands

🌈 Rainbow cake, rainbow trout, rainbow diet, rainbow nation, rainbow coalition, rainbow flag, rainbow laces, rainbow bridge. Rainbow Road, Rainbow Connection, Rainbow Six, Rainbow Warrior, Rainbow Dash, Rainbow Brite, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Zippy from Rainbow. Waiting at the end of the rainbow, Over the Rainbow, In Rainbows. I Can Sing a Rainbow, unweave the rainbow, taste the rainbow. Double rainbow, Reading Rainbow, R O Y A L R A I N B O W.

🌈 Like many a natural phenomenon, the rainbow has done a lot of descriptive work in its time, and has been metaphorical at least as often as meteorological. It is rich in imagery possibilities. In Rainbow Islands, among other things, rainbows do a good job of standing for the creative urge. 

🌈 Rainbow Islands (or originally in full Rainbow Islands: the Story of Bubble Bobble 2, which I am going to ignore for now but will be important thirteen #1s from now) is a conversion of an arcade platformer which was originally, like Chase HQ, by the flexible Taito. You play as a boy climbing up vertical levels, and he is aided by the power to spout rainbows in the direction he is facing. Once you press fire, the rainbow arcs across the screen, and then, rather than disappearing, remains in place, light rendered solid. You can use your new rainbow bridge to cross gaps, or to make it further up the screen. Walk to the top of a rainbow and produce another rainbow, and you can climb further still, ascending to the sky on brilliant light.

🌈 For all their seeming solidity, though, rainbows aren’t the most structurally sound building material. If you’re unable or unwilling to continue walking along the rainbow and jump and land on it, it will come crashing down. So will all of the rainbows in contact with it or in its path. You will be left falling down until you reach a more solid platform, and down is a particularly risky way to go because Rainbow Islands enforces a time limit on each level via a rapidly rising sea level. There is a plus side to causing collapses and rainbow cascades, though, in that falling rainbows defeat enemies that they come into contact with. Rainbow Islands, therefore, gives you very different possibilities for how you use your creative ability. You can use it to raise yourself up, to build your own rainbow road. Or you can turn your creative force into a destructive one and bring everything crashing down around you. The paths you can take are equally powerful and, at each moment, mutually exclusive. It feels like you’re remaking the world around you through your choices in a way which is compellingly beyond anything else I’ve covered so far.

🌈 That’s not the only way that Rainbow Islands ties in with the rainbow. There’s the significant number seven. The rainbow’s spectral smear got defined into seven distinct colours completely arbitrarily, to tie up with the seven musical notes, the seven objects in the Solar System, the seven days of the week. Rainbow Islands gives you seven giant gems across seven islands, to be collected by means of seven small gems, one of each colour, produced by dropping rainbows on enemies in seven septants of the screen. It may be a game that gives you a straightforward goal to get up the screen and a simple but deep way of doing so, but there’s a systematic, mind-boggling complexity behind it too, if you want. There are power-ups to give you double and then triple rainbows, to increase their speed. There are permanent power-ups if you get the giant gems. I can’t remember where I read it (the game manual? A magazine?) but I remember being amazed at the extent of the baroque system of power-ups which are available, collectable in sets to add up to other power-ups and so on, a lovingly assembled world of depth that doesn’t even have to be engaged with.

🌈 One more way that Rainbow Islands lives up to the rainbow is the the colourful nature of the thing. Rainbow Islands is colourful. More than that, Rainbow Islands is CUTE. Cute bright little bees and spiders float about with their cartoon eyes, get trapped under a rainbow and turn into angry cute bright little bees and spiders. Or in later levels, there are cute vampires. Cute helicopters. Cute mounted artillery. Each level ends with a treasure chest that bursts open with a cornucopia of cute bright fruit and veg and sweets, and the words ‘GOAL IN!’ spelled out in cute bright bubbly rainbow letters. 

🌈 On top of its frequently satisfying and rewarding choices, Rainbow Islands offers a playing experience which is a constant sensory delight. And that’s even before the sounds of the ssshwish of rainbows and the cute bright little version of “Over the Rainbow” that plays over the top of it all. It’s all very different from much of what Super Chart Island has covered, and having played the Commodore 64 version a lot as a child I know that was the case even on computers capable of fewer colours than the Atari ST. Other developers could make games with an aesthetic this joyfully excessive; they just generally didn’t, more’s the pity. Even better, and unlike many later games taking after this period, there is no sense that Rainbow Islands is meant to be about any kind of contrast between the phenomenal cuteness and the depth and complexity. Why should it be? The colourful surface and everything else beyond it aren’t two separate things at all. The rainbow can be both seven colours and all the colours.