The "Artifical Hair Bros." finally released their inofficial sequel to the adventure game "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders", which was programmed by Lucasfilm Games (nowadays known as LucasArts) in 1988. The sequel (which is a fan project) has been in development for about seven years now, was produced with the help of some professionals and is called "Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space".

You can read some facts about the developers here.

As for now, the game sadly is playable for German speaking gamers, only, because it features German dialogue and subtitles. However, as the developers already posted in their forum some days ago, there will definitely be an English version of the game after some more time (let's hope it's not another seven years). So if you're interested in Zak's new adventures, you might just want to check the homepage of the developers regularly to keep up to date and to find out when this english version hits the download mirrors.

Gamers with Linux as their operating system are still experiencing problems with getting the game to run properly as we speak, but those might be fixed in some days and probably, because a new linux version of the engine with which the game was developed is currently in development, it will be no problem at all anymore in the near future to run it on a system else than Windows. But for now you still have to stick to Microsoft.

The game was programmed with the "Visionaire"-Engine and if you take a look at some screenshots of the final release version then you will find that they actually look pretty decent. If you would rather like to see Zak in motion, you can also watch trailers of the game here or there. This presentation on GIGA (with engl. subtitles) is also worth watching.

The original game "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders" (starring journalist Francis Zachary McKracken in a fierce battle against the Caponians, an alien race that intends to lower the intelligence of earth's inhabitants severely by using dial tones) is considered as a cult adventure by many people. The inoffical sequel now features Zak McKracken again, who is on a flight from Memphis to Zurich at the beginning of the game, but is then suddenly knocked out and wakes up in San Francisco again, with no idea of what got him there. One thing is for sure: The Caponians seem to be back. And Zak will have to fight them once more. He does that in more than 50 explorable and detailed backgrounds. You will find music, cut scenes in 3D and spoken dialogue all through the game. And according to the first people already playing it the puzzles seem to be good and challenging, too. As well as packed with references to adventures of the olden days. By the way: You get all that for free.

A list of several download mirrors can be found here. Don't be shocked: You will need to download a file of 1,94 Gigabyte. Which is yet another evidence for the enormous effort that has been put into this project. By people who just really like Zak. And brought him back to life.