Snow Bros. – Nick & Tom is a 1990 platform arcade game developed and published by Toaplan, distributed by Romstar in North America and Europe. Built around a deceptively simple premise, two snowman twins fighting their way through fifty single-screen levels to rescue kidnapped princesses, it became one of the most beloved fixed-screen platformers of the early 1990s, spawning multiple home console ports and a lasting cult following that endures decades later. In this article, we’ll cover its story, gameplay mechanics, home ports, and why arcade fans still remember it so fondly.
A Tale of Cursed Princes and Kidnapped Princesses
The game’s story follows Nick and Tom, twin brothers living a charmed life alongside their respective princesses, Puripuri and Puchipuchi. That happiness comes to an abrupt end when the evil King Scorch curses the two princes, transforming them into snowmen, before kidnapping both princesses for himself. Now wielding strange new powers tied to snow and ice, Nick and Tom set out across fifty increasingly difficult stages to track down King Scorch and rescue the princesses he stole from them.
This origin story, involving the brothers being cursed princes rather than simply being snowmen from the start, was actually a detail introduced specifically for the game’s later Nintendo Entertainment System port rather than appearing in this original arcade release.
A Second Attempt at a Genre Toaplan Knew Well
While Toaplan is best remembered today as one of the most respected developers of shoot ’em up games during the arcade era, Snow Bros. wasn’t actually their very first venture outside that genre. The studio had previously experimented with a top-down, fixed-screen action game called Performan back in 1985, years before Snow Bros. arrived. By 1990, however, Toaplan had clearly refined their approach to fixed-screen platforming, drawing influence from earlier genre staples like Taito’s The Fairyland Story, Bubble Bobble, and Don Doko Don, while still carving out a distinct identity of its own.
Trap, Roll, and Crush: The Core Gameplay Loop
Snow Bros. supports both single-player and cooperative two-player action, with each player controlling either Nick or Tom as they work through each level’s enemy gauntlet. The central mechanic revolves around throwing snow at enemies until they’re completely covered and transform into rollable snowballs, while enemies only partially covered in snow become temporarily immobilized, unable to move until they manage to shake themselves free.
Once an enemy becomes a full snowball, players can kick it into motion, sending it bouncing and rebounding off walls until it either shatters or crushes any other enemies unlucky enough to be caught in its path. Rolling snowballs can even trigger a chain reaction, setting off any other stationary snowballs they happen to collide with along the way, allowing skilled players to clear entire screens with a single well-placed kick.
Power-Ups That Change the Pace of Battle
Defeated enemies occasionally drop colored potion bottles, each granting a different temporary advantage:
- Yellow potion — Grants a long-range snow shot, extending the reach of thrown snowballs.
- Red potion — Increases the player’s movement speed across the stage.
- Blue potion — Makes snowballs grow larger and encase enemies more quickly.
- Green potion — Inflates the player character like a balloon, allowing them to fly freely around the screen and instantly defeat any monster they touch.
These power-ups added meaningful strategic variety to otherwise frantic, fast-paced stages, giving skilled players tools to manage particularly difficult rooms packed with multiple enemies at once.
The Looming Threat of the Pumpkin Head
Snow Bros. didn’t simply let players take their time clearing each stage. If a level dragged on too long, an ominous, invincible pumpkin head would appear and begin actively hunting the player. While this pumpkin could be temporarily stunned using snowballs, leaving it unable to harm players for a brief window, allowing it to linger for too long would cause it to summon relentless ghosts that roamed freely around the stage, completely immune to any form of attack. With no way to stop these ghosts directly, players were forced to simply avoid them entirely while scrambling to finish off the stage’s remaining enemies as quickly as possible.
A Structured Climb Through Increasingly Difficult Bosses
The game’s fifty stages were structured into five larger sections of ten floors each, with a boss encounter capping off every tenth floor. These bosses could be damaged either by directly pelting them with thrown snow, a notably slow and tedious approach, or far more efficiently by crushing them with rolling snowballs created from their own minions, rewarding players who mastered the game’s core snowball mechanics rather than relying on basic attacks alone.
Bringing the Arcade Experience Home
Snow Bros.’ arcade success led to a wave of home console ports, each handled by a different developer and publisher. The Famicom version was published directly by Toaplan themselves in Japan in December 1991, while Capcom handled the Nintendo Entertainment System release internationally that same November, retitled Snow Brothers for Western audiences.
A Game Boy adaptation, titled Snow Bros. Jr., arrived even earlier in 1991, developed by Dual and published by Naxat Soft in Japan before Capcom brought it to North America in January 1992. Due to the handheld’s technical limitations, this version restructured several bosses to fight alone rather than in pairs as they had in the arcade original, while also adding an entirely new set of ten additional levels to complete after finishing the original fifty stages.
The Mega Drive version, released in Japan only in May 1993, holds the distinction of being the only home console port developed directly by Toaplan themselves rather than an outside studio. This version went even further than the Game Boy release, adding twenty entirely new levels after the original fifty, in which players take control of the previously kidnapped princesses Puripuri and Puchipuchi after Nick and Tom themselves get captured by a brand-new villain.
A European Port That Never Made It to Shelves
Not every planned version of Snow Bros. saw the light of day. Ocean Software’s French division had licensed the rights to bring the game to both the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST following its showing at the 1990 European Computer Entertainment Show, with development beginning almost immediately. Despite a working conversion reportedly being completed, Ocean ultimately decided the game wouldn’t perform well enough commercially on home computers and canceled the release outright. The unreleased Amiga build eventually leaked online years later in 2006, finally giving curious fans a chance to experience this lost port for themselves.
Critical Reception and a Lasting Cult Following
Snow Bros. was met with largely positive reception from both critics and players following its original release, even earning a notable award from Japan’s respected Gamest magazine. Its charming visual design, catchy soundtrack composed by Osamu Ohta, and addictive cooperative gameplay helped it build a genuine cult following that has persisted well beyond its original arcade run, with many retrospective reviews praising how effectively Toaplan refined the fixed-screen platforming formula established by earlier genre pioneers.
A Legacy That Inspired an Entire Subgenre
Snow Bros.’ influence extended well beyond its own direct sequels and ports. Several later games adopted strikingly similar mechanics and structure, including Parasol Stars, Tumblepop, and Bubble Symphony, all building on the same snowball-style trapping and rolling formula that Snow Bros. had helped popularize. A more direct spiritual successor, Nightmare in the Dark, arrived a full decade later in 2000, swapping snowballs for balls of fire while keeping gameplay otherwise nearly identical.
The original game’s success also directly led to a proper sequel, Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves, released in 1994, which holds the unfortunate distinction of being the very last game Toaplan ever developed before declaring bankruptcy that same year.
Final Thoughts
Snow Bros. – Nick & Tom proved that a developer best known for high-speed shoot ’em ups could pivot effortlessly into charming, cooperative platforming and still create something genuinely memorable. Its simple yet endlessly satisfying snowball-trapping mechanic, combined with escalating boss battles and a real sense of urgency from its pumpkin-head chase sequences, helped cement it as one of the most fondly remembered fixed-screen platformers of its era, one whose influence can still be traced through numerous games that followed in its footsteps.