After releasing Bubble Bobble Remastered last year, the fan developer Davide Bottino and his team are back with yet another Commodore 64 title, inspired by the classic Taito game.
Bubble Bobble: Lost Cave, as the new title is called, was released earlier this month and is actually a port of a famous arcade hack from the developers Bisboch and Aladar.
This was a popular hack release in 2012 that brought together various levels that TAITO originally designed as bonus content for the console ports of the game into a single package, creating a slightly more conventional sequel to the original than 1987's Rainbow Islands.
The new Commodore 64 port has been built with the permission of the original co-creator Bisboch and uses the technical foundations established on Bubble Bobble Remastered. For instance, it boasts updated visuals from the official Software Creations' C64 port from 1987, as well as an optional two-button control scheme.
There are 100 levels to play through in total, "faithfully adapted to the C64 engine", with Bottino also introducing some slight "gameplay adjustments" here and there, to better fit the C64 game engine.
Speaking to the Retro YouTuber BastichB 64K in a recent video, Bottino said the following about the project: "Lost Cave is built directly on the work done for Remastered. I’d say it’s a natural continuation and completion of that project.
"Basically, after Remastered was released, it took another month for the editor developed by my friend, Victor Widell, to reach the point where it had all the features I needed to create a brand new Bubble Bobble episode with entirely new levels."
"Once I was sure that the project was technically feasible, I immediately contacted the creator of Lost Cave, Andrea Babich [“Bisboch”], who, like me, is Italian, to ask for his blessing. He was very enthusiastic and kindly provided me with the full level data that sped up my work enormously."
If you want to give the game a try, you can download it for free from itch.io.