There's a version of bomberman here that supports unlimited players. You connect to wifi via your phone and your phone becomes a controller. I've had up to 89 people play at once although pretty much everyone dies before they can figure out where they are.
There's also a browser version that supports USB controllers, as many as you can connect (I think some browsers only allow 4 but another a browser has no limit except whatever the USB limit is)
If you zoom out to say 25% in your browser you can bump up the number of players to 1000s. It's not optimized at the moment for 1000s of players.
You could easily extend it to use some other types of controllers.
It also points out what appears to be a bug in MacOS. Even with the OS volume at the lowest setting the game will be very loud when all the explosions start. On the one hand this is probably a bug in Chrome's audio system but on the other hand an individual app should arguably not be able to make loud sounds if the OS is set to it's quietest setting.
Thanks! There is also http://gameofbombs.com/ , quite fun to play online. Unfortunately it is not open source and cannot be used for closed groups/LAN.
Thanks. Going to check it out. Bomberman on the Sega Dreamcast, especially with 4 people, was some of the most fun gaming I've ever had. Also, I'm old.
I loved the Dreamcast's Bomberman Online. It had multiple play modes, two of which (submarine and ring match) I have never seen in any other incarnation of the game.
Bomberman is the original Battle Royale: Lots of players starting distributed around a map, farming and gathering powerups and making their way to each other until there's one person left standing. (Even including the map constricting in size as time runs low like the 'storm' in Fortnite and PubG.)
Curiously, the article has a screenshot that clearly displays the words "Battle Royal" in the 10-player mode; that would push the earliest use of this term in video games back to at least 1994.
Brawl Stars is a hybrid arena game with a Bomberman type mode, but its really a last man standing. It comes off as Bomberman since you can collect power ups during the match.
Back in the mid to late 90's the only thing that could run on our high school PCs was DOS based programs. We had Windows, but everything was locked down and we couldn't install games.
So once we learned about QBasic, everyone suddenly became a pro at nibbles and gorillas because that was the only thing available. That is until I found a shareware site with the source code for a bomberman clone.
But the new excitement brought new demands and my best friend and I spent many afternoons hacking changes into the code. Reverse engineering bomberman was my first experience with coding.
You can download the source here on this wonderful site. Just do a search for bomberman.
Atomic Bomberman supported 10 players. Two on keyboard and the rest on gamepads. Or AI. Letting 10 AI players smash themselves was the best "screensaver".
I would have never known that plaid is the absolute worst background for readability if not for this website. I felt like a robot trying to parse a CAPTCHA.
https://github.com/greggman/hft-boomboom
There's also a browser version that supports USB controllers, as many as you can connect (I think some browsers only allow 4 but another a browser has no limit except whatever the USB limit is)
https://greggman.github.io/hft-boomboom/
Warning: Music. Also it won't start until there are at least 2 players.
You can see it run with 125 players with random inputs here
http://greggman.github.io/hft-boomboom/?settings=%7BnumLocal...
Actually it's better to look at if you crank up the number of players so there's less dirt and increase the starting bomb size
http://greggman.github.io/hft-boomboom/?settings={numLocalPl...
If you zoom out to say 25% in your browser you can bump up the number of players to 1000s. It's not optimized at the moment for 1000s of players.
You could easily extend it to use some other types of controllers.
It also points out what appears to be a bug in MacOS. Even with the OS volume at the lowest setting the game will be very loud when all the explosions start. On the one hand this is probably a bug in Chrome's audio system but on the other hand an individual app should arguably not be able to make loud sounds if the OS is set to it's quietest setting.