Bubble Bobble on the C64 is getting something it never really had the first time around: a proper follow-up. Bubble Bobble: Lost Cave is a new, fan-made “spiritual sequel” from Dave’s Retro Forge that takes a legendary arcade hack and rebuilds it for Commodore’s 8‑bit breadbin, complete with 100 fresh stages originally designed by Taito for console ports.
Lost Cave started life as an arcade ROM hack that stitched together exclusive levels from various home versions of Bubble Bobble into one massive 100‑stage remix. Dave’s Retro Forge is now hauling that concept over to the C64, using the Bubble Bobble C64 Remastered engine as a base and treating this as its “natural evolution and completion.” The team has painstakingly adapted those console-only layouts to fit the original C64 engine’s quirks, even down to reproducing bubble airflows within the machine’s memory limits.
On paper, Lost Cave reads like the C64 sequel people imagined in their heads back in the late ’80s:
- 100 new levels adapted from Taito’s console ports, rebuilt with arcade accuracy in mind.
- Tweaked layouts and airflow where needed to preserve difficulty and “feel” despite hardcoded engine limits.
- Optional two‑button controls for proper “jump on button 2” arcade vibes.
- Remastered visuals matching Bubble Bobble C64 Remastered, with sprites and backgrounds converted directly from the arcade.
The project is framed as pay‑what‑you‑want, fan-made, and very explicitly “by fans, for fans,” with credit to: graphics, levels, and coordination by Davide Bottino, reverse engineering and coding by Victor Widell, intro work by Aldo Chiummo and Antonio Savona, and nods to the original Lost Cave arcade team Bisboch, Aladar, Stephen Ruddy, Andrew R. Threlfall, and Peter Clarke.
Between last year’s Remastered overhaul and this new level set, C64 owners are about to have the closest thing they have ever seen to a full-on Bubble Bobble 2 on Commodore hardware. For a game that still owns entire generations’ hearts, that is a pretty sweet late birthday present four decades on.
Source: Dave’s Retro Forge via Indie Retro News
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