TURRICAN II: THE FINAL FIGHT

Manfred Trenz's Turrican II is one of the really, really great home-computer classics that has shot its way into the hearts of all run-and-gun fans, especially its 1991 Amiga incarnation. But did you know that almost five years later there was a much-improved conversion for DOS computers?

- Paul Kautz

Turrican II: The Final Fight is an important chapter in the history of German action games: released in 1991 by Rainbow Arts for Amiga and C64, it was a technical marvel on both platforms and quickly conquered the hearts of all shoot-em-up fans with its large, open levels and breathless action.

In the months that followed, the game was ported to the Atari ST, CDTV, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. However, there was another version that rarely ever gets mentioned, probably because it hit the market almost five years after the game’s original release! We are, of course, talking about the MS-DOS version of Turrican II, which began development at the end of 1992. That’s when then 16-year-old Sebastian Mies picked up the phone to reach someone at Rainbow Arts to present the programming routine he had developed to enable smooth eight-way scrolling on VGA graphics cards. On the other end of the line was Thomas Brockhage, then head of development at Rainbow Arts, “Sebastian approached us because he really wanted to make a game with his impressive technology. We quickly agreed on Turrican II as it was one of his favourite titles. We then sent him all the game assets from the Amiga, the code, graphics and sound, and they went straight to work.”

The “they” were not only Sebastian, but also his two friends Marc Hellwig and Fabian Ihlenfeld, who he brought onboard to work on the project as well. The three of them, all still in high school at the time, called themselves Sun-Project and quickly ported Turrican II’s first world to the PC, raising hopes that the finished game would be released by the end of 1993. This hope was soon to be shattered, however, for several reasons, according to Sebastian, “School, idealism, a lot of naivety, a lack of experience and discipline and of course occasional conflicts within the team.”