Bubble Trouble From 2002 to Now: The Flash Original, Bubble Struggle and the HTML5 Remake on This Site

2002: a Flash game from Croatia

Kresimir Cvitanovic wrote Bubble Trouble in Flash in 2002 and it went up on Miniclip soon after, where it sat on the front page long enough to become one of the site's best-known games. The rules were a tightened version of the arcade game Pang: a walled room, bouncing bubbles, a harpoon that fires straight up, and bubbles that split in two on every hit. The devil in the trench coat and sunglasses was the developer's own character, and the stone room and red timer bar were there from the start.

The name

For a stretch of years the game was called Bubble Struggle on the developer's own site, with Bubble Struggle 2 and Bubble Struggle 3 following as sequels that added ladders, trampolines, ice floors, reverse gravity and new weapons. Most players still know all of them as Bubble Trouble, and the sequels are listed under that name here too. Bubble Trouble 3 is on this site as its own game.

The end of Flash

Browsers dropped Flash at the end of 2020. Plenty of games from that era survive only through Ruffle, the Flash emulator, which is good but not perfect. Bubble Trouble was luckier: the developer rebuilt it in HTML5 himself, keeping the room, the bubbles and the physics and adding the items, settings and two-player mode of the later versions. It is that remake, not an emulated SWF, that bubbletrouble.org serves at the top of the page.

What is the same and what is new

The same: the room, the bounce, the split, the timer bar, the three lives, the arrows-and-space controls. New: a second player on A, D and Q, a settings screen for the keys, items that fall from bubbles, high scores kept in the browser and touch controls for phones. It drops you straight into level one, with the menu behind the pause button.