Free game graphics: Tyrian ships and tiles

I stumbled across a personal treasure this weekend. Tyrian, the ancient vertically scrolling shooter from long ago still happens to have a fansite. While browsing through their forums, I noticed that Jason Emery, keeper of the Tyrian flame, had made the source code available and folks were actively digging through it.

My thanks go out to whoever ripped the graphics from the source code and posted them as PNGs. Somewhere in the mess of moving multiple times in the past decade, I managed to lose the original files. The freshly ripped files have some transparency errors here and the order is a tad confusing, but I am delighted to have copies again.

Hot summer, great job
I drew up the original graphics in about 4 months as my first real summer job. A friend of mine who shall go by the pseudonym "Ray" had sent around some of my artwork (without my knowledge, I might add) and I ended up getting a random email from a very young Alex Brandon asking me if I wanted to make some graphics. It was either that or another summer stocking beer in the 7-11 cooler. 19 and making games. Heck yes.

I had recently splurged on an Amiga 1200 and it managed to pay for itself that very summer. Alex sent me a short list of list of levels and said "Draw us some graphics." So I did. I turned up the radio and crunched away from 11am when I woke up to 11pm when David Letterman came on. There is some wierd stuff in there as a result, but no one ever complained. They just said "Make some more!"

Remastered and free
In hopes of contributing back to the great and eternal indie scene, I 'remastered' the graphics by removing some of the conversion dirt that had accumulated. Man, I haven't done pixel editing in years. I also took the liberty of stripping out as the various 'non-Danc' flesh-colored seahorse graphics that managed to make their way into the tile set. I may not have gotten all of them, so credit likely goes to Jason for the lovely hotdogs, etc.

I'm making the set available for using in your games, prototypes, animations, etc. Again, use and abuse them as desired. If you make something cool, let me know! Feel free to link back to this page so that others can grab the graphics and mess about. It is good to share old pixel graphics. :-)

And to think, all those hours of effort fit easily into a little more than a meg of pngs.

Download the files here
Remastered Tyrian Graphics.zip (1.3 megs)

best wishes,
Danc.

PS: I'm still missing the store graphics and the cutscene graphics. One day I'll get my hands back on the infamous 'Head on a spike' picture that caused so much consternation.