Saturn Bomberman Documentation: UNCOVERED!

 

As if out of complete nowhere, more pieces of rare developmental information about the Bomberman series have finally come to light, and I'm all here for it.

A channel I haven't been aware of until more recently is one titled C62-Hu. 

Run by a former employee of Hudson Soft who I'm guessing was around for a good while, he's uploaded a few videos talking about the company and recalling his days there. I had come by his Hudson Soft HQ exploration videos sometime before, but initially brushed it off as some guy breaking into an old building. Anyway, as of late, he's been looking into scrounging up some old documents about certain games and providing nuggets of info about certain games. One of them in particular was Saturn Bomberman.

For some context going into this, I'm unsure if I've ever stated this before, but we actually know next to nothing about the development of too many games. To my knowledge, the most we know about these days are Bomberman Live: Battlefest, Super Bomberman 3, and Super 2/3. Otherwise, games like Bomberman Max are legitimately a mystery, with next to no concept art or anything being released. Despite knowing about the games, it's generally safe to say that we really don't know about these games. 

Alongside a video where he recaps some generally well-known info about Shoji Mizuno's contributions to the series, he does mention Shingeki Fujiwara and his initial desire to be a manga artist before settling down at Hudson Soft, as well as something about a Cocoro Comic feature featuring him that was released at some point. Could this tell us more about what brought him to Bomberman? 
...or did the video already state this, but I didn't see or hear it because I don't speak Japanese and YouTube's auto-translation feature is kind of bad?

At some point, we're presented with this picture:

After searching for a bit, Mr. C62-Hu eventually came upon and released a few of Saturn's initial design documents, which are chock-full of pictures drawn by Mizuno.

For context on this first one, "Bomberman SS" is Saturn's Japanese name. I don't think it takes a genius to decipher what the letters mean.

From the latter two pages [plus the barely visible fourth one], we're able to decipher that:

1.) The Tirra abilities, at least at one point, were based of the Louies from Super Bomberman 4, such as the block-hopping, kicking, etc. 
There are also some unused ones, such as a balloon-based one.

2.) While much more evident in Jetters, a general headcanon of mine that Mujoe was always some kind of outspoken underling of Mechard's [or Mechadoc, depending on who you ask] is practically confirmed here. Also, the dude has a darkly-colored monocle over what would just be a human eye in the final game, which I think looks pretty cool. Additionally, his mustache was intended to be longer and black. Additionally, Dr. Ein looks noticeably more subdued here than his final counterpart. I'm thinking it's his mouth being closed and his not breaking tables that are throwing me off.

...and finally, on an irritating note, he's posted a picture of some kind of document likely containing information about Bomberman Jetters, which I'm absolutely sure people would love to see. Yeah, we have some stories about the recording process from the numerous VAs thanks to a booklet provided with the now-rare Japanese Blu-Ray release that I need to release my bad Google Image translations to, but I'd like to see more stuff from the actual developmental side. 

To end this off, I decided to look into who the music composer behind [at least the first] Bomberman Max is, using 64: The Second Attack as a basis since they were both developed behind Vatican around the same time. My current conclusion is that renowned composer Yasunori Mitsuda may be the one responsible, though I can't be sure. A lot of their compositions are very loose-sounding, often being comprised of a solid backing track with the leading melody being a lot more improvised, as if someone took out a keyboard and started going at it until they found something that sounded good.

I previously asked Nori Bomber [Norio Okubo] about this a few months ago, but was sadly met with he not recalling anyone behind Max. A few weeks ago, albeit still to no answer, I did decide to ask Matsuda more directly, since he does use his Twitter every once in a while.

...and that's going to do it for now. Thank you all as always for reading my incoherent rambles about a series only 5 people still actively care about. Be sure to stay tuned to the Bomberman Channel for a big ol' writeup on all the bad bomber teams I've working in and out on since late last year, I think?