About seven years ago user pikablu of the Resetera forum started a thread about an old Dragon Ball Z fan RPG that had long fallen into obscurity. It was an MS-DOS game that “used a lot of sprites from the Super Butōden games”, which were Dragon Ball Z games released for SNES consoles in the ’90s. According to the user, this rugged fan RPG was available on a Dragon Ball Z site called Planet Namek.
The thread attracted 14 responses. No one could help.
But everything changed today when new user BenjiBrew entered the fray. They too have spent years looking for this Dragon Ball Z RPG, and luckily had some success finding it. BenjiBrew “stumbled across an old backup CD of one of my old PCs from 2004” and found the strange artefact, whose full title is Dragon Ball Z – Wish for Immortality. Not only that, they offered a MediaFire link and some screenshots so that the game won’t “vanish into the void again”.
Here are the screenshots BenjiBrew posted:
It wasn’t long before the thread creator confirmed that the game is indeed the one they were seeking. “I’ve 100% confirmed it is it,” pikablu wrote. “I streamed the game with my friend who also played it before and we both lost our collective minds when we found Icebox is in the game!!!”
(Icebox, as the user explains earlier in the thread, is the RPG’s name for its equivalent to the Cooler character.)
Thanks to BenjiBrew’s discovery the game now has a home on archive.org, where a little bit more information is provided. The game was made in O.H.R.RPG.C.E., or Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine. This is a free and open-source game creation engine first released in 1997 and most recently updated in January 2026. While RPG Maker predates it, it wasn’t until 2005 when RPG Maker XP made its PC debut in the west, so for a long time O.H.R.RPG.C.E. was the go-to option for home made 8-bit style RPGs in the west.
To play Wish for Immortality, you’ll need to download the O.H.R.RPG.C.E. client, which is available here. Then you can head to the archive.org page to grab the game itself.
I don’t know whether the game is worth playing if you weren’t there, but the story of its re-emergence reminds me that the internet remains indispensable for some things. I played countless throwaway DOS games as a child, a handful of which I have later struggled to put a name to, let alone find. One of these was Trugg, the vague memory of which haunted me for years before a chance online encounter. There’s still an old third-person mech PS2 game that I haven’t managed to find (and no, it’s not an Armored Core game).
So I guess the moral of the story is: if you can’t find anything, post something. Someone later Googling with a similar itch may be able to help.
