Description

Tape Recovery Simulator 96K is a game focusing on recovering data off of reluctant old tapes.

During the 80's and early 90's audio analogue tape was one of the main storage mediums with a capacity of 600 Kb stored as actual sound. It wasn't very reliable to begin with, since tapes and tape recorders varied greatly in quality and compatibility. If not stored properly, tapes have a tendency to degrade over time, especially if left near strong magnetic/electric fields (like cathode monitors/TVs, speakers, children, power sources, power plants, EMP bombs, any kind of star, ...). Sometimes, some of the data can still be recovered even after decades of mistreatment.

Tape Recovery Simulator 96K builds new game mechanics around old data recovery tricks. Caffeine Withdrawal Games’ philosophy is “games you haven’t played before” and TRS 96K is the perfect example of it.

Features:

    • DEMO to be released on SOON. The DEMO version contains the absolutely mandatory tutorial, the 3rd Goatsketcher tape, windows 11 compatibility, and a bunch of bugfixes and improvements.
    • Featuring Goatsketcher, who is undeniably the greatest artist who has ever lived and ever will. His masterpieces were hidden away for decades on tapes to shield them against the not yet ready general public. But now this amazing art is brought to light by Goatskether's teary eyed widow who is willing to break her husband's dying wish and bless us all with his creations.
    • enjoy using a real simulated tape player with all the proper buttons (play, stop, ff, rew) + a few new ones, in an attempt to reinvent the tape.
    • audio tapes holding data with multiple degrees of corruption.
    • rediscover the lost art of loading data off tapes:
      • tweak sound (volume, pitch, tape speed, revert, ...) to appease the 8bit loading routine that is extremly unforgiving to data errors
      • learn and use old data recoverty tricks (header swap, audio channel swap, leader shortcircuit, ...)
      • play with data (descramble, decrypt, decode, search, piece together, ...)
    • work and suffer for a pittance as an EES employee with an absurd boss and (semi-)impossible tasks.
    • discover and assemble stories, fake art, real art, conspiracy theories. Everything is sprinkled with lots of plain old insanity fueled by EES' boss.
    • 8bit applications and minigames (BASIC / machine code) waiting to be recovered, repaired, executed, re-executed and re-re-executed.
    • the 8bit look, feel and simplicity we all crave for.
    • turbo tape loading speed speed of up to 1.6 kb/s
    • mock advertising
    • no cutscenes (unskippable or otherwise)
    • true tried and tested eye care advice for the player.
    • power though and ultimately fail to meet impossible deadlines(just like real life).


    Images

    speccy.png
    ultra_fine_tuning.png
    z02_email_TRD.png
    tapeLoadingError.png
    select_tape4t.png
    z03_email_tutorial.png
    z01_email_hardwarePolicy.png
    tape_player_tape.png
    z04_email_welcome.png
    tape_player_tutorial_tape.png
    tre.png

    There are far more images available for Tape Recovery Simulator 96K, but these are the ones we felt would be most useful to you. If you have specific requests, please do contact us!


    Selected Articles

    • "In Tape Recovery Simulator 96K, you’ll work for a firm specializing in recovering data from cassette tapes."
      - INTO INDIE GAMES
    • "TRS96K Is a Wonderous Niche Indie Title About Data Recovery on Tapes"
      - 3bit
    • "TRS96K is definitely based on an unique concept"
      - Indie Game Picks
    • "Tape Recovery Simulator 96K Announced"
      - Blue's News
    • "Tape Recovery Simulator 96K Puts You in the Hi-Top Sneakers of a Data Recovery Specialist"
      - AusGamers
    • "Tape Recovery Simulator 96K"
      - Games Freezer

    Further information
    A lot more information and screenshots available on our website www.caffeinewithdrawalgames.com



    Team

    Claudiu Müller
    main developer, tape enthusiast, prowd owner of real life data tapes in both analogue and digital formats, retro computers enthusiast.


    presskit() by Rami Ismail (Vlambeer) - also thanks to these fine folks