Firethorn

Twilight

Status: Preview, Findability: 5/5

Another game from Twilight duo, Harold Klink and Martijn Althuizen.

This time we have a set of very promising space SEU demos which were a new development by Twilight which sadly were cancelled early on. These were given a game title of "Firethorn", which was actually thought up and coined by Jeroen Tel at the time.

There are 3 demos in total, showing various techniques which were picked up at the time. Harold had recently picked up the technique of producing parallax scrolling on the C64 and these were the results.

The games didn’t get very far, and this was pretty much it. However, Jeroen Tel apparently gave the guys some unreleased music to use in the game, which doesn’t seem to be in any of the demos unfortunately. There might be another version out there somewhere which has this music in. We’ll certainly be taking another look through the disks to see if we can find a version with the music.

Check out the demos and also some extra bonus goodies from the guys which were also found on their work disks. Various intros unused and music demos.

Overall the demos show some promising ideas, but sadly they never got far enough to make anything really playable. They are certainly worth a look though!

More soon from the developers on these demos…

Contributions: Harold Klink, Martijn Althuizen, Jazzcat, Ignorance

Supporting content

Available downloads

Creator speaks

Martijn Althuizenspeaks to GTW about work on Firethorn...

"As for unfinished, unreleased games, we've also started work on a game called 'Firethorn'. A name, by the way, coined by Jeroen Tel (of Maniacs of Noise fame), as he was at the time also a resident of Helmond (the city I live in). He even gave us one of his unreleased music-scores to use for a 'game-in-progress' demo I think it was.

It's been a while since I've seen Jeroen. Last time I met him in a bar and we talked a bit. It's funny how sometimes you still meet people that were also in the C64 scene. Just last year I had a multimedia company nearby program something for me. Turns out the owner of the company is somehome related to I think it was 'Euphoria'/Boys Without Brains who made Flimbo's Quest, Disposable Hero and even the acclaimed Hawkeye. Somehow Helmond, Aarle-Rixtel and some other neighbouring towns beared some fruitful contributors to the C64 scene. C64 parallax scrolling was pretty much invented around here.

I remember Harold being told what the trick to it was and him immediatelly having a go at recreating it himself. All in assembler... LDA, STA, JSR etc. etc. Harold also wrote a lot of c64 music himself using the MoN editor. I also remember sitting in Jeroen's room while he's telling us about some of the plans he had at the time. I remember feeling pretty impressed by it all back then... :-) Firethorn wasn't really a game, more a show-off of the parallax scrolling thingy we managed to do. I remember being pretty proud seeing the mountains and buildings (I think it was the Taj Mahal) I had drawn scrolling by with pipes and stuff scrolling in front of them. "

Martijn Althuizen.

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