Bluppo (1997): A Boulder Dash Clone With 160 Levels and Real Ambition

Rating band: Fan-favorite · Developer/Publisher: Webfoot Technologies · Designer: Matija Tomaskovic & Bruno Babic · Year: 1997 · Platform: DOS · Theme: Cartoon, Shareware, Multiplayer

Boulder Dash turns thirteen years old and gets cloned constantly is one way to put it. Getting cloned well is rarer. Bluppo, a 1997 shareware release from Webfoot Technologies, is one of the clones that actually understood what made Peter Liepa and Chris Gray’s 1984 original for First Star Software work, and then built past it instead of just repainting the same formula.

The core loop is recognizable to anyone who’s touched a Boulder Dash game before. You move through a scrolling cave environment digging through dirt, dodging boulders that fall the moment you clear the ground beneath them, and working toward a specific collection goal before the exit opens. Bluppo’s twist on that goal is fish: gather a set number per level and you’re through to the next one. It sounds minor written out plainly, but it changes the rhythm of play in a real way, since fish tend to cluster in spots that also happen to be the most boulder-dense parts of a level, which means the reward and the risk are almost always sitting in the same place.

Bluppo wasn’t alone in mining this particular vein of DOS shareware. Boulder Dash’s falling-rock puzzle formula spawned an entire minor genre through the late 1980s and 1990s, Supaplex among the better-known entries, and the shareware scene was crowded enough with clones that standing out took more than just copying the original’s rules. Most competitors settled for reskinning the same cave-and-boulders loop with new graphics and calling it a day.

Hazards go beyond falling rocks, too. A hostile sturgeon patrols certain levels, aggressive enough that avoiding it becomes its own subgame layered on top of the boulder-dodging you’re already managing. And there’s an oxygen meter running down constantly in the background, a mechanic Boulder Dash itself never really used, which adds real time pressure to levels that would otherwise reward pure patience. Early levels barely test any of this. By the midgame, you’re planning routes several moves ahead just to make sure you don’t strand yourself with boulders on one side, a hungry sturgeon on the other, and not enough oxygen left to backtrack.

What actually separates Bluppo from the pile of other Boulder Dash clones from the same decade is production value more than mechanical novelty. VGA graphics that hold up decently against the DOS shareware crowd it was competing with, a soundtrack that isn’t just looping bleeps, and 160 levels, which is a genuinely large count for a shareware release built by a small team. Most clones of this formula shipped twenty or thirty levels and called it done. Bluppo’s designers, Matija Tomaskovic and Bruno Babic, clearly weren’t satisfied with a quick cash-in.

Two-player simultaneous support is the detail that gets skipped in most write-ups of this game, and it shouldn’t be. Boulder Dash clones from the 1990s were, almost without exception, single-player affairs. Bluppo let two people share the screen and compete for the same fish, which turns a genre that’s usually a solitary puzzle exercise into something you can actually play against a sibling or a roommate. If you grew up trading a keyboard back and forth with someone during a DOS gaming session, this is exactly the kind of game that filled that role.

Webfoot Technologies kept making games for years after Bluppo, eventually moving toward mobile and casual titles as that market grew through the following decade. Bluppo reads, in hindsight, like a studio still figuring out what it was good at, and landing on “polish a familiar idea until it feels generous” as an answer worth keeping.

How to run it today

Bluppo’s DOS release runs without complications in DOSBox. Mount the game folder, launch the executable, and both the VGA graphics and two-player keyboard controls work exactly as they did on period hardware, no patches or configuration tweaks required.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox) · Controls: Keyboard, supports two simultaneous players · Setup difficulty: Low

Legal status

Bluppo was released as shareware from the start, meaning free distribution was always part of how Webfoot Technologies intended the game to reach players. There’s no record of any dispute over its circulation since, and shareware titles from this era generally carry the lowest conflict risk of anything in this catalog. This one is about as close to freely circulating with no known issue as it gets.

If you liked this, try

Boulder Dash 2, the direct sequel to the game Bluppo is cloning; Terra Probe, another falling-rock puzzle game working the same formula from a different angle; and Dynablaster, the European release of Bomberman, for a different flavor of grid-based multiplayer chaos from the same general era.