Tape Recovery Simulator 96K is a real game and has a demo coming soon

Get your pencils ready, because CaffeineWithdrawalGames has announced that Tape Recovery Simulator 96K has a demo coming out on November 20, 2023.

I’m not sure where to begin with this. I guess for anyone still in their early-20s or younger, a cassette tape is a cartridge the size of a standard Kit-Kat bar. They’re called “tapes” because their data is contained on a thin strip of plastic covered in a film conductive to magnetism. It stores data by magnetizing portions of it. It’s a lot like how a hard drive works.

Oh, wait, I guess a lot of hard drives are solid-state these days.

Anyway, these cassette tapes were often used to store music that could be played directly from a home stereo, but they could really hold any kind of data. Early home computers would often use them to store files, programs, and games.

The downside to magnetic storage is the risk of them becoming “degaussed,” meaning they lose their magnetism. Since most files only function when all of their data is present, even the slightest loss of magnetism can result in them becoming corrupted or entirely unreadable.

Okay?

All the proper button

Tape Recovery Simulator 96K tries to capture the art of recovering files from cassette tapes. How? Probably fiddling with knobs. Listen, my expertise when it comes to fixing tapes is sticking a pencil in one of the spools and twisting to reel everything back in. But that’s what Tape Recovery Simulator 96K is trying to teach us.

There’s a “real simulated tape player with all the proper buttons” and what looks like an emulated Commodore 64 screen. There are tutorials to teach you what the right knobs to twist are. You get emails from your boss letting you know how important this data is, as if that’s your problem. 

Real talk, I think one of the most unique aspects of the video game medium is the ability to provide hands-on experiences with these lost arts. It might not be very useful information in this day and age, but consider this: that trigonometry you learned in high school. Do you ever use it? Probably not. Ergo, video games are at least as useful, if not more useful, than high school math.

The demo for Tape Recovery Simulator 96K will be released on November 20, 2023. There will be a test afterward.