King and Balloon (Arcade)

If you had a winning formula for a video game, how often would you recycle it? And in those reuses of the formula, what changes would you make to keep things fresh? After their arcade hit Galaxian, it’s likely Namco was asking themselves this question, and while the space shooter would go on to have a sequel in the form of the even more popular Galaga, they would reuse elements and technology from Galaxian to make an arcade game of a different color. King and Balloon’s origins are immediately recognizable to those familiar with its ancestor, but there are still plenty of departures in concept and design that make it stand out from Namco’s other work.

King and Balloon positions the player as something people can’t really seem to agree on. Visually it looks like two green men standing on either side of an orange cannon they can move left to right and fire upward, the cannon able to fire once its previous shot has hit an enemy or disappeared by touching the top of the screen. An arcade flyer by Namco refers to these men as a singular bowman who shoots lasers while other sources sometimes refer to them as a regular crossbowman, but whoever they are, they are charged with the odd task of protecting a portly yellow king from an incoming invasion of 42 balloons. Arranged in four rows at the top of the screen and providing points based on their coloration, the balloons all pop in one shot save for the rare case where three might join together into one large balloon, three shots needed to take down this bulkier inflatable. Once all 42 balloons have been cleared from the screen, a new round will start with the same balloon arrangements, the player continuing to play until they’ve run out of lives, the only chance for an additional one on top of the starting set of three occurring when you reach a certain score.

The balloons all can fire down on the cannon although the king doesn’t have to worry about their attacks, his royal highness marching back and forth below the parapets that the green men stand on. However, balloons can also dive down from above, this dive similarly dangerous for the cannon carriers but also able to kidnap the king and carry him away if they make it to the king’s part of the castle. There are no extra enemies or changes in enemy behavior besides a gradual ramping up of the aggression the balloons exhibit, but even as they start firing more often and dive down one after the other, the player has plenty of ways to stay in the game, and that comes down to the game’s most interesting feature: the loss condition.

In King and Balloon, if your orange cannon is shot or hit by a divebombing balloon, it will explode, but that’s okay and downright expected. You do not lose a life or any degree of progress when the cannon is destroyed, and it will return to action shortly after ready to pop more balloons. This is because in King and Balloon, it is the king’s lives you need to be careful with, your cannon a line of defense meant to keep him from perishing. However, it’s fairly inevitable once the enemies start pushing harder that they will head down to where the king is ambling back and forth, but even there things don’t spell doom yet. A balloon will come to a rest in the bottom layer of the castle and stay there for a bit, and if it makes no contact with the king during that brief period, it heads back up to join whatever remaining enemies still move back and forth in the sky. If they are in the king’s path and he touches them… you STILL aren’t going to lose a life yet, as the balloon now needs to finish the kidnapping job by ferrying him up to the top of the screen. The balloons move somewhat quickly, but you still have a good chance of getting to the balloon and popping it with a shot before the king is captured fully, your liege dropping down to his layer of the castle with an umbrella to resume his march once more. The method by which you lose lives may seem generous at first, but the balloons are fairly good at claiming the king so it doesn’t undermine the core gameplay. In fact, it’s what makes King and Balloon more involved than some other old shooters you’d find in the arcade.

In a game of King and Balloon, there are plenty of clever approaches you can utilize to chase the high score. Knowing your cannon is expendable means you can put it in dangerous situations if it means popping the balloon carrying the king or preventing one from flying into his path. Knowing the balloons eventually leave the lower castle floor if they don’t touch the king means you can focus on other foes and let the ones that can’t catch the king slip past your guard without consequences. If the enemies are getting too aggressive for your tastes, you can sidestep them and just try and shoot them as they fly back up from below, and since they pass through your cannon safely as they rise back up, you don’t have to worry about surprise destruction from below. Many of these are the reactionary considerations that make certain arcade games simple but fun, the game not quite complex because it has so few variables but these pieces work together in a way where thinking about how to react to the situation can be quite rewarding. Even though the only scaling between rounds would be balloons diving down and shooting more often, their somewhat random approach to doing so keeps you on your toes enough that two play sessions through the same stages won’t feel identical.

There are even valid strategies in King & Balloon that involve getting your cannon destroyed at certain times since balloons won’t fire for a short period after your respawn or stalling so that the last few balloons will form into the higher value large balloons for extra points. However, if King and Balloon comes up in modern conversation, it’s unfortunately not for its arcade action with a small bit of strategy. Instead, King and Balloon is often pointed to as one of the first games to synthesize speech, the king himself speaking simple lines to the player based on his state of distress. When a balloon picks him up he barks out a “HELP!” seen both on screen in text and heard in a fairly good facsimile of human speech. If the player is too slow and he drifts completely off screen, he lets out an oddly enthusiastic “BYE BYE!”, but if you are quick enough to save him, he instead says “THANK YOU” without the gratitude appearing on screen as text. Minimal but novel at the time, it was certainly meant to impress people with some technology that sounds almost human, but it appears retrospectives often get distracted when evaluating the game’s quality and gameplay potential to note this feature. I still bring it up because it is worthy of mentioning, but it seems this quality arcade title gets buried beneath its notability for the digitized voice and reusing Galaxian’s assets and programming like enemy behavior and scoring.

THE VERDICT: While it’s easy to spot that King and Balloon uses the same hardware as Galaxian, this arcade shooter retooled itself enough to be a distinct and enjoyable experience. You are shooting up at a bunch of enemies at the top of the screen who come in identical waves, but the loss condition has a few layers to it that open up more strategic processes for popping 42 balloons. The rejuvenating cannon encourages risk-taking, the king’s march allows you to let enemies past so long as you’re prepared to react if he is caught, and the fact you can only lose a life if a foe has made it past multiple small steps to snagging the king gives you multiple chances to prevent a loss. It encourages a mild degree of tactics from its players, making a return visit to the arcade cabinet feel different since it is open to different approaches and isn’t overly punishing to experimentation.

And so, I give King and Balloon for arcade machines…

A GOOD rating. King and Balloon was the surprise hit of my visit to the arcade. Recognizable cabinets wouldn’t surprise me too much when they turned out to be good and the more obscure or lesser known games I found were more variable in quality, but King and Balloon felt like a title that unfortunately missed the limelight despite its fun design. Perhaps it’s the strange name and concept of having to save a king from enemy balloons, maybe it was overshadowed during the arcade boom, or maybe players just didn’t recognize the thought that could help the experience be more than just shooting things on a screen. Whatever it is, King and Balloon is an enjoyable title if you can find it because it crams so many small considerations into a game that never slows down because of them. The task of shooting balloons quickly shifts to keeping them from getting below you, then shifts to trying to make sure they don’t land near the king, and if they do, it finally ends up being about rescuing the king quickly before the process begins again. It’s not easy despite having the layers the balloons have to get past to make you lose, but the many allowances the game gives you before stripping away a life makes it a game that’s easy to get invested in as you work out winning strategies or adapt on the fly. Like other arcade titles though it would be interesting to see this concept expanded with variations between rounds instead of just reusing the same fleet of 42 every time, but the variation in how they attack at least keeps it from becoming dull quickly.

King and Balloon isn’t really a forgotten gem so much as a good game that deserves more love than it gets. It requires a bit of adaptation and encourages thought but doesn’t sacrifice the ease of entry, the often reflexive shooter game giving the players a bit more to chew on to help its gameplay loop avoid feeling too repetitive. It’s not likely to wow any players with its now quaint digitized voices, but King and Balloon can still provide some enjoyment for those looking to break away from the typical designs featured in the space shooters this game technically shares ancestry with.