Czarny Kruk

1998 Seven Stars

Platform: Commodore Amiga

Czarny Kruk (which translates roughly as ‘Black Raven’) was the working title for a dark graphic adventure that unfortunately never made it properly into production. The project came about following the team’s experience with adventure games such as Kajko i Kokosz and Wacki.

In a video interview looking back at the company’s history, Piotr Kulikiewicz recalled that a group of people approached the team, possibly through an intermediary, with artwork and the idea for a new adventure game. A number of background screens had already been created, with Czarny Kruk being used as the working title for the project.

The backgrounds were all physically painted using oil paints on various materials, including what was described as a type of board or plywood. Three different artists were responsible for producing the screens, which meant there were noticeable differences in both their styles.

The intention was to create a fairly dark adventure featuring an animated main character. Experiments were carried out using a person named Radek, who was filmed wearing a black coat and walking left, right and diagonally in front of a blue sheet. The footage was then reduced in size, transferred into an animation program and coloured, presumably with the intention of placing the character over the hand-painted backgrounds. You can see some of the videos below of the characters and walking video used.

It was a particularly ambitious project, with several dozen background screens planned for the complete adventure. There were concerns however about whether such a large amount of hand-painted artwork could realistically be completed in the timeframe. The artists were recalled as possibly being based in Warsaw, though this particular detail was uncertain from the interview.

Unfortunately, the backgrounds ultimately became the project’s downfall. The development team wanted to have all of the required screens ready before committing themselves to the full production cycle. A scenario had also been proposed, but many of the backgrounds were still unfinished and progress on completing them seems to have slowed everything considerably.

As recalled in the video interview, the team waited and waited for the remaining artwork, but it simply never arrived. Without any confidence that the complete set would eventually be delivered, they couldn’t justify keeping people employed and waiting around when there were other projects to work on. Eventually they had to call time on Czarny Kruk and the game was abandoned.

It was a huge shame as the team had high hopes for the project. From the recollections given, it seems that Czarny Kruk never reached full production, though some artwork existed and the character animation experiments had certainly begun.

Until now, very little from Czarny Kruk has ever been seen publicly. However, in August 2026, Rygar got in touch with Games That Weren’t after obtaining a selection of original development materials directly from the publisher. These include scans of several of the hand-painted backgrounds described by Piotr Kulikiewicz, along with character and animation test material from the abandoned project. We are very happy to be able to share these materials for the first time, providing a fascinating glimpse of how Czarny Kruk was starting to take shape before development came to an end.

With a huge thank you to Rygar for obtaining, preserving and sharing these previously unseen materials with Games That Weren’t, and to Piotr Kulikiewicz for sharing the history of the project in his video interview.

Videos

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Video interview

Gallery