Thirty-four years after it first shambled onto NEC’s PC-98, Dead of the Brain is getting a second life on modern PCs. Fakku, the adult manga and game publisher that recently acquired developer FairyTale’s entire back catalog, has put up the Steam page for the 1992 horror adventure game, with launch date set for October 30. For the English speaking audience, this will be Dead of the Brain’s first official release in the lingua inglesa.

If you’ve never heard of the FairyTale dev studio, there’s a reason, and it’s a fun one. The studio spent the ’80s making adult-themed games until a 1991 shoplifting scandal involving an underage perpetrator and one of their more extreme titles made them briefly radioactive. The solution? Pivot to horror games until the heat died down. Dead of the Brain was the first title to follow that pivot, and it unabashedly wears its influences on its sleeve: the entire game is a love letter to the American splatter films of the 1980s, Evil Dead and Re-Animator, most specifically. 

Players take on the role of Cole, an just an ordinary guy whose scientist buddy Dr. Cooger invites him over to witness a new serum bring the dead back to life (It works, derp). Unfortunately, the dead come back hungry for brains, as they do… to alleviate the pain of being dead, as I understand it. In any case, things go about as well as you’d expect.

The gameplay in Dead of the Brain is a classic early-90s Japanese adventure: visual novel dialogue scenes broken up by point-and-click exploration with using “look”, “use”, and “get” commands, plus some quick-time events where you must click on the zombies’ hit boxes before they eat you… and your brain. Character designs came from Ryuichi Makino, a name anime fans may recognize from Wandering Son and Re:CREATORS.

In terms of its place in horror game history, Dead of the Brain came out in 1992, the same year as Alone in the Dark, the game that basically invented 3D survival horror (it even got a PC-98 port, funnily enough). That’s four years before Resident Evil gave the genre its name and a PlayStation-sized audience, and three years before Clock Tower made horror a sensation on Japanese consoles. In 1992, if you wanted horror on PC, you were playing HorrorSoft’s Elvira games or Waxworks, which launched the same year. Dead of the Brain was Japan’s PC scene doing something different: a Romero-style zombie flick in an adventure game wrapper, years before zombies swarmed the entire entertainment industry.

Before now, English-speaking fans were able to choose from three separate fan translations, including a rough 2019 patch from Retronomicon, a more accurate PC-98 patch from WINE on Halloween 2023, and a PC Engine version patch from Dave Shadoff the very same day. WINE even translated the sequel in 2025. But this is the first time anyone can buy it in English, officially, which which is pretty cool for a game this obscure.

For this new release, Fakku says the original pixel art is preserved and upscaled for modern displays, the FM synth soundtrack is untouched (and will be sold as DLC for chiptune aficionados), and a few quality-of-life changes like friendlier checkpoints and new hover hints for players raised on tutorials… and video game journalists. The Steam page carries a disclaimer that the 1992 experience is otherwise intact, which should mean no censorship.

Dead of the Brain 2 is also confirmed to be on the way, along with the rest of FairyTale’s Nightmare Collection horror titles like Marine Philt and Necronomicon. For now, though, October 30 is the date to mark on your calendar for zombies, brains, Halloween…. it’s funny how things just work out, sometimes.

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