Success! But I still had the problem of how to update the screen without people seeing the results as it drew - I needed page-flipping. I figured out that if I had a monochrome cut-out version of my graphics, I could place it down first to erase the background, and then place the real art on top of it in XOR mode. I had to dive into my own experiments and research for the first time. My previous games had been primitive Pac-Man type games using ASCII, written in ST Basic, so GFA was mind-blowing with its “bit blit” function that let you grab and place arbitrary blocks of pixels anywhere you wanted! It wasn’t enough, though - it didn’t have alpha capabilities. Dark Fortress was my first game, written in GFA Basic at age 14. His essay his been edited for length and clarity. The existence of Dark Fortress has been noted in the past, but this is the first time the game has been shared widely.īelow, Flower discusses “Dark Fortress” in his own words. Witte and Flower teamed up again in 2001 as “Mythyn Interactive” to develop the MMORPG Linkrealms.Ī screenshot showing the first level of the game Dark Fortress. But Flower’s first foray into games was Dark Fortress.įlower went on to found the Rewolf Entertainment studio, which produced Gunman Chronicles. Flower, a talented young pixel artist, developed a graphical front-end client for TG which featured superb visuals as well as some sound and animation. Witte was the architect of Thieves’ Guild. In recent weeks I’ve been corresponding with Flower and Paul Witte to unearth the story of their Atari ST BBS door game Thieves’ Guild, which they developed together in 1988-93 under the “Mythyn Software” banner. Learn more about Dark Fortress on the wiki page.
Download the dark-fortress.st disk image.Today I’m happy to share “Dark Fortress,” a previously unreleased game written by Herb Flower for the Atari ST in the late 1980s. Hey Atari ST fans! Want to play something new? The title screen from the Atari ST game “Dark Fortress”