Taito's bizarre trampoline game Plump Pop is coming to Arcade Archives

Hamster Corporation has announced that Taito's 1987 arcade game Plump Pop is joining the Arcade Archives lineup. The digital release will be available on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

The mechanics are a strange twist on the standard block-breaking formula established by Breakout and Arkanoid. Instead of controlling a sterile paddle to bounce a ball into a wall of bricks, you control two parent animals holding a trampoline. Your projectile is your own round child. You launch the baby into the air to pop balloons and knock flying enemies out of the sky.

Rotary dials and trampolines

This specific style of game descends from Atari's 1977 arcade game Circus. That early title replaced the Breakout paddle with a seesaw and asked players to launch clowns into the air to pop balloons. Taito took that basic framework a decade later and injected it with their trademark late-eighties weirdness.

Taito originally released the game in Japanese arcades in November 1987. It never received a dedicated Western arcade release. The physical cabinets are incredibly rare today. Most Western players only know the game from its inclusion in the 2005 Taito Legends compilation for the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox.

The core loop requires basic spatial awareness and timing. You slide the trampoline left and right to catch the falling child at the correct angle. This sends them back up toward moving targets. The original arcade cabinets used a rotary dial for control. This provided a very specific type of wrist-flick precision that is hard to replicate on a modern gamepad. Hamster usually offers adjustable analog sensitivity in their menus to help compensate for the lack of a spinner.

Bouncing pigs and aliens

Players can choose to play as a family of cats, dogs, or pigs. The choice does not change the physics, but it does change the sprites bouncing around the screen. The game also has a two-player cooperative mode. Two families share the screen and try not to get in each other's way while clearing out the sky.

The enemy designs are completely absurd. You spend the early levels fighting standard balloons and clouds. Then the game starts throwing demonic angels and UFOs at you. The environments shift from peaceful castles to bizarre alien landscapes. You just keep bouncing your pig into the sky until the threat is neutralized. The boss fights are equally strange. You have to repeatedly launch your child at a giant floating creature until it explodes.

Hamster's port includes the standard Arcade Archives wrapper. You get save states, button mapping, and online leaderboards. The PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 versions are technically branded as "Arcade Archives 2." This indicates the newer generation of Hamster's emulation shell, which includes a few extra screen filter options and a Time Attack mode. The core game remains identical to the 1987 code.

We see a lot of obscure titles hit these digital storefronts every week. Most of them are standard shoot-'em-ups or generic platformers. A game about weaponizing your offspring to destroy aliens is a much weirder pull from the Taito vault.