About the game

THE SCREAMER first came out in 1985 on NEC's PC-8801. The PC-9801 version, the one OpenScreamer plays, followed in 1986 on the computer that ruled Japanese homes and offices in the 1980s. The game never left Japan.

Register a screamer, gear up in the town, then climb BIAS: six floors of first-person maze. To learn what is going on, you talk to people by typing a word to ask about: a drug, a password, a monster's name.

Read more

• Giant Bomb (English)
• EGG Console The Screamer PC-8801 (official Nintendo Switch re-release, 2026, Japanese store)

Reviews with pictures

• AKIBA PC Hotline! retro column (Japanese, 2020: the box, the ads and the town)

What OpenScreamer adds

None of this changes the game itself:

• Saved games, and going back a few steps after death (the Modern difficulty; Original plays as in 1986).
• A map of each floor, and a journal of what people told you and what you found.
• Gamepad, touch screen and an on-screen keyboard. Keys and buttons can be changed.
• Sharp, CRT or soft display, colour schemes for colour blindness, larger text and a modern font.
• Text to speech, typewriter text shown at once, and fast-forward.

Two settings do change the game. The way to floor 6 is on by default: as shipped, the PC-9801 version can't be finished, and this opens the way as the PC-8801 version does. Fixing the original's bugs is off by default.

How it works

OpenScreamer contains nothing from the original game. The first time you start it, it asks for your disk image (choose it, or drop the file on the window) and reads the game's pictures, maps and text from it in about a second, in the same way OpenTTD needs Transport Tycoon's files.

The disk image itself isn't copied, so you can move or delete it afterwards. OpenScreamer checks every file it reads and accepts only the original release. If a file isn't the one expected, it says which. Nothing is sent anywhere.