Dead of the Brain, FairyTale’s 1992 zombie adventure for NEC’s PC-98 computers, gets its first official English release on Steam on Friday, October 30, 2026. FAKKU is publishing it for Windows, macOS and Linux, with English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese text, according to the game’s store page. No price has been posted yet.
The setup is pure 1980s video store. You play Cole, whose scientist friend Dr. Cooger has a serum that brings the dead back. It works, in the worst way, and the town fills with zombies. Director Takeshi Uechi has said the game is closer to splatter films like The Evil Dead and Re-Animator than to anything George Romero made. It plays as a point-and-click adventure with visual novel scenes and quick-time events, all run from a panel of verbs: Look, Talk, Get, Move, Use.
Why this one took 34 years
FairyTale made adult PC games before it made this one, and a 1991 scandal over one of them pushed the studio toward horror. Dead of the Brain came out of that turn. It went from the PC-98 to the FM Towns, MSX2 and X68000 within months. In 1999 it reached NEC’s PC Engine Super CD-ROM², bundled with the 1993 sequel and given voice acting. None of those versions left Japan. (PC-98 games came on floppy disks, which is why my cartridge wall has never heard of it.)
Fans did the work first. A PC-98 fan translation has been around for years, and an English patch for the 1999 PC Engine disc arrived in 2023, as Time Extension reported. This summer FAKKU bought the rights to FairyTale’s whole back catalogue and announced it at Anime Expo.
What the Steam version changes
The store page calls it a re-release of the 1992 original, and the screenshots show the PC-98 screen layout intact, verb buttons and all. The pixel art is upscaled. The additions are optional: hover hints, visible hit boxes, and a game over that sends you back to the start of the scene instead of your last save. That last one matters, because 1992 adventure games killed you often and without warning. The FM music is in the game, and the soundtrack is also sold as DLC.
What is missing is the sequel. Dead of the Brain 2 is not mentioned anywhere on the page.
So the call is simple. Both games with voices still means the 1999 PC Engine disc, in Japanese. The original in English, with no patching, means October 30. I have never owned a PC-98, and I am still putting this one on the wall in spirit.
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