Tyrian/Tyrian2000 - Information & Trivia

About Tyrian

Various crap about Tyrian.

	Tyrian & Safari Software
	Other Shoot 'Em Ups
	Tyrian & Zanac
	Box Art
	Early Screenshots
	Tyrian For Gameboy
	Tyrian 2000 Art
	Stealth & PORN

Tyrian & Safari Software

Tyrian is featured in the "Ordering Information" (order.exe) screens from the game "Linewars II" published by Safari Software. It shows 3 early screenshots of the game:

The first screenshot is overlaid by this text:

Safari Software is growing fast, and we would like to thank you for supporting shareware by registering the games you like. Customers like you help ensure that we can create more of the games you want to play.

The background of this page is an actual screen from our upcoming game, Tyrian.

The next two screenshots are overlaid by:

TYRIAN
Coming Soon from Safari Software

The game Highway Hunter by Safari also has the first screenshot in its order.exe with "Coming soon from Safari Software! TYRIAN" at the top and "KOOL TEXT GOES HERE!" at the bottom.

The left part of the first screenshot is also used on the back of my copy's box.

Safari Software was a company run by one of Epic Megagame's producers. Sometime before publishing Traffic Department 2192 they merged with Epic. Afterwards they didn't seem to publish any more games, probably because Epic was large enough to publish them all by itself. Tyrian was originally to be published by Safari Software but once it became clear that it was going to be great it was moved to the larger company.

Other Shoot 'Em Ups

Raptor: Call of the Shadows (AKA Mercenary 2029)

Features:

27 levels.
Shop containing extra weapons, shield, bomb, etc.
Multiple skill levels.
No secret levels or weapons I'm aware of.
Not much story.
Fixed mission order.
Purchase multiple weapons and switch between them during missions.
Receive enough damage and some weapons will be destroyed, but you can take spares.
God mode.
Only one secret mode which only adds coconut throwing monkeys (and dinosaurs?) to levels.
Nice sound and graphics.

Developer: Mountain King Studios
Other links: Moby Games Entry Raptor at 3D Realms

Demonstar

Features:

Windows only.
2 players via hotseat or net.
Level editor.
Extra levels and music from the developer's webpage.
No shop.
4 different main weapons with multiple power levels. Changing weapons gives you the lowest level of that weapon.
3 different bomb types.
2 missile types and 3 levels of side/rear weapons.
Debug mode.
No secrets.
See some Raptor ships rendered in 3D.
18 levels.
Multiple skill levels.
Not much story.
Nice music/sound and graphics.
Fixed mission order.

Developer: Mountain King Studios
Other links: Moby Games Entry

Black Star: First Attack

Features:

60 extremely repetitive levels.
Many different ships with different speeds, sizes, armour and weapon/equipment slots.
Shop containing shields, ECM, reactors, armour and many weapons.
Surprisingly boring/confusing upgrade system, all weapons/ships/equipment are always available.
Claims to be a "clone" of Tyrian and Demonstar, high hopes.
Boring "plot" poorly translated from Russian.
Level editor that's only good for making levels as boring as the originals.
Mostly fixed mission order, levels are too similar to make it matter anyway.
High res 3d rendered graphics, but all ships are plain grey and unskinned.
Extremely repetitive and boring level graphics.
No game changing codes, just god mode, money, etc.
Encyclopaedia with all weapons/ships/enemies etc in the game.
Bad sound and music.

Developer: Black Star Software

Tyrian & Zanac

The 31st and 32nd songs in the Tyrian jukebox playlist are ZANAC3 and ZANAC5. These two songs are reproductions of two songs from the old NES game "Zanac". In Tyrian ZANAC3 is played when you pick up a secret level orb, in Zanac it's played when you get an extra life. ZANAC5 is level music in both Tyrian and Zanac. Other features of Zanac are also present in Tyrian.

If you want to hear the Zanac music download this zip, extract it and run the file ZANAC.BAT. Use the left/right arrow keys to change the track being played and Escape to exit. Track 3 is "ZANAC5" in Tyrian and track 9 is "ZANAC3".

Box Art

Tyrian's box art (published by Manaccom): Front, Back

Tyrian 2000's box art (published by XSIV Games): At mobygames.com

Early Screenshots

In addition to the screenshots from Linewars II above I have a couple of early screenshots of Tyrian:

I found this one at Tyre. It's from an early Holes or Tyrian level. Note the apparent level progress indicator and the reference to rear weapon modes as patterns. What about the green indicator below the front and rear weapon power levels? Maybe they indicate when a weapon is ready to fire or how much power they use.

I also found this one at Tyre. Jason Emery says this about it:
"This is an old graphic from back when we were rendering the planets - originally was thinking of having a screen with a grid display and moving from one to another, but later we just used the little nav screen."

Tyrian For Gameboy

World Tree Games have ported Tyrian to the Gameboy Advance. It is designed to be faithful to the PC version but it will obviously have some differences. I don't know too much about it other than it will have multiple ships like in the original. At least some of the music is apparently by Gustaf Grefberg (AKA Lizardking). He is a Swedish musician from the Amiga demo scene. Alexander Brandon (the PC Tyrian musician) did music too. The World Tree Games website has these two screenshots, one from the GBA version and the other from the aborted GBC version.

I recently located CyclopsX who made the graphics for the GBC version of Tyrian. His site has this title screen pic:

He was also kind enough to send me a zip file of the art he made for it. You can download it here. Note the new "ending" pic and the "comm screen" pic. It's an impressive job considering that only 4 colours could be used for each 8x8 tile including a transparent colour for sprites.

While poking around the sXs site mentioned below I found a "Tyrian 2000 Sales Pack" document for both the Gameboy versions sitting in their sample porn directory. It has a bunch of screenshots and a list of features. Items of note: my suspicion that "generators" would be referred to as "engines" is strengthened and the GBA version uses the original music converted to the GBA chip. You can download the document here.

Update: I got sent an under development build of T2KGBA. You can see screenshots of it here.

Tyrian 2000 Art

CyclopsX also did the extra graphics found in Tyrian 2000. These are some original pics of the new ships in Tyrian 2000 from his site. There are more sprites and background tiles here.

Stealth & PORN

Yep PORNO. Pornographic videos and video "games." Stealth released these under their "sXs" label. The games were apparently called "Virgo" and "3D SeXXX Simulator." The DVD/CD videos are "My Corporate Office," "My Corporate Combo" and "My Corporate Gonzo." Strange names for porn. Maybe they're meant to be inconspicuous. All 8 links on the sXs page are porn ads for other sites and I haven't found any mention of these products elsewhere on the net yet but I'll keep looking.