Why Do Video Games Associate Mice With Bombs?
I like it when people reach out to me about weird little video game-related mysteries that have been bugging them for years.
I really like it when I’m asked the question and I realize I have no idea what the answer is.
And I especially like it when I never thought about this matter myself, despite having played the same video games as the person asking the question.
For these reasons, I was more than happy to look into a question from Bluesky user Qalamari asking why so many Japanese video games associate mice with bombs. The examples provided include Mouser from Super Mario Bros. 2, the Bombchu item from Legend of Zelda, the bomb-dropping mice enemies in Konami’s Goonies II and the playe two character from NMK’s Bomb Jack Twin, who sports a mouse-like mask in contrast to the Batman-like one player one wears.
That’s enough to make a pattern, and I can even think of some additional examples. In Sonic Battle, Tails has an attack called Chu² Bomb, and although the name might be a reference to the 1999 Sega game ChuChu Rocket!, that game also features mice — and when you think about it, there are obvious differences between rockets and bombs, but also they both famously go boom. And Mappy-Land, the home console sequel to the Namco arcade game Mappy, gives a single weapon for the protagonist cop-mouse to use against the burglar-cats: bombs. Daroach, the leader of the titular bad guy gag in Kirby: Squeak Squad, also attacks with bombs (although not exclusively).
It’s not that every mouse in every Japanese-produced video game has a bomb association, however. There’s a mouse-shaped robot enemy in Mega Man 5, for example, that does not explode or throw bombs. The Little Mouser enemies in the Yoshi games are more known for stealing than blowing things up. The mouse power-up in Capcom’s Little Nemo: The Dream Master uses a mallet as a weapon, not bombs. And the most famous mouse in video games, Pikachu, is associated more with zapping than exploding. But then again, mice are common enough household creatures that we can have more than one association with them. I mean, look how many paragraphs we are into a mouse-centric post and I haven’t even mentioned cheese yet.
If you research the connection between mice and bombs on Google, its AI feature will likely try to convince you that the association stems from so-called plague bombs deployed against China and Korea during World War II. This is not an AI hallucination, unfortunately. This really did happen — though it didn’t exactly involve mice the way you or Google AI might think. The most famous incident seems to be 1940’s Ningbo plague attack, during which the Japanese dropped plague-infested fleas on a Chinese city, reportedly resulting in 1,554 deaths. While it is true that a secret Imperial Japanese Army research facility, Unit 731, bred and infected the fleas specifically for the purposes of biological warfare, the murine is limited to the fleas being raised using populations of mice and rats. However, Google AI also says that Japan developed a type of bomb that would drop live plague-infected mice on enemy targets, but I’m not clear if this technology ever existed, much less was ever tested, much less was ever used. The chief Google AI “source” for this claim is a Reddit post, and so I scanned a 2017 book on this subject matter — Hidden Atrocities: Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial, by Jeanne Guillemin — to see if this is mentioned. It’s not, and it seems like it would be; it’s the exact kind of perversion of the natural world that tends to get human attention, because we like to gawk at the awful things we do to each other. Furthermore, if this “mouse bomb” was ever actually real, I question if it would be the source of the association between mice and the kind of round, cannonball-esque bombs we see in video games, as opposed to the ones dropped from airplanes.
All that said, I was shocked to find that a bat bomb really did exist, in that it was attempted by the United States military. It was never implemented against enemy targets because it turns out bats are not reliable soldiers and they destroyed a New Mexico air base.
While I also did some reading about how mice have been proven to be effective at sniffing out bombs, my guess for the source of the Japanese connection between mice and bombs takes us to the world of folklore. The kodama nezumi (小玉鼠, literally “little ball mouse”) is a yokai that supposedly inhabits the forested mountain areas of Japan’s Tōhoku region. It resembles a small mouse, and just as the name tanuki can apply to both the real-life Japanese raccoon-dog and its mythical counterpart, this name can apply to both the Japanese dormouse and a supernatural version that can supposedly react to the presence of humans by inflating like a balloon and then loudly exploding, splattering their guts everywhere. That sounds like… not the most effective self-defense mechanism ever, if I’m being honest, but apparently the intention is actually to communicate to hunters that the mountain gods are displeased and that their expedition should be abandoned.
To me, this seems like a more reasonable explanation for how video game mice became associated with bombs in Japan — and specifically the round kind that show up in old cartoons and, for all I know, never really existed in real life. What’s interesting about the yokai origin is that none of the video game examples I listed retain the self-destruction aspect, which arguably is the most important aspect of them. You do see it in, for example, Final Fantasy’s recurring Bomb enemies, which act a lot like the yokai but don’t retain any of the mouselike aspects.
The fact that so many video games might translate this yokai into mice that use literal bombs might seem like a disconnect — and, to be honest, there may be a part of this that I’m still missing. If you have additional information or an entirely different theory, I’m all ears.
(That was not meant to be a mouse pun, I swear.)
The one other thing that came up in my research relates to a different mouse-like Pokémon, Maushold, and its special attack, Population Bomb. Because I feel like someone will bring it up if I don’t, I should explain that this is not an explosive attack but a slashing one.
Its English name would seem to derive from the Japanese original, ネズミざん or Nezumi Zan, figuratively meaning something like “proliferation” but literally meaning “to multiply like mice,” referring to mice’s tendency to make babies quickly and frequently. It seems like a Japanese version of the English expression “to breed like rabbits.”