Thalion grew out of one of the first demo groups on the Atari ST. Two of its three founders, Udo Fischer and Erik Simon, belonged to The Exceptions, the German group known as TEX, and Fischer had written what he described as the first demo released for the ST, in 1986. ACE introduced the company in 1990 as “a group of young ex-hackers” with “the expertise and potential to write a major blockbusting game”. In five years in the small town of Gütersloh, Thalion made role-playing games, platform games and a fast 3D motorbike race for the ST and the Amiga. Its development team left at the end of 1993, and by the middle of 1994 the company was bankrupt.
Fast facts
- Founded: October 1988, in Gütersloh, West Germany, by Holger Flottmann, Udo Fischer and Erik Simon.
- The name: taken, ACE reported, from Tolkien’s Silmarillion.
- Scene roots: Fischer (“-ME-”), Simon (“ES”) and the musician Jochen Hippel (“Mad Max”) were members of The Exceptions, an early Atari ST demo group.
- Games: Seven Gates of Jambala and Chambers of Shaolin (1989–90, with Grandslam in Britain), Dragonflight (1990), Wings of Death, Amberstar (1992), No Second Prize (1992), Lionheart (1993) and Ambermoon (1993).
- German distribution: Ariolasoft handled its games around 1990.
- End: most of the development team moved to Blue Byte at the start of 1994; Thalion was bankrupt by June 1994.
The Exceptions
The French magazine ST Magazine devoted its demo pages to The Exceptions in November 1991 and called them the first demo group on the ST. Udo Fischer, who signed his work “-ME-”, told the magazine that he had started on a Commodore 64, writing 68000 routines on paper and assembling them by hand before he owned a 68000 machine. When he got his ST he typed them in as BASIC pokes. In 1986 he wrote what he called the first demo released on the ST: “a picture and a scroller, not much really!” (in translation). His Little Demos and BIG Demo followed. Then he stopped, he said, because he was spending his time programming Dragonflight. Jochen Hippel, “Mad Max”, had converted the Commodore 64 music used in the BIG Demo, and the group’s graphic artist was “ES”, Erik Simon.
ACE described Thalion’s origins more bluntly in February 1990: they were “firmly rooted in the underground subculture of the games hacking and cracking”. Co-founder Erik Simon told the magazine that most of the programmers came from that scene, and that “these ex-crackers are technically superb – but they find it more interesting to code rather than crack”.
A company in Gütersloh
ACE visited Gütersloh, which it called a picturesque German town about two hours’ drive from Düsseldorf airport, where the team worked together and also met at a local bar a few minutes from the office. The magazine thought it fitting that a company named after the Silmarillion should start with a fantasy role-playing game. That was Dragonflight, which Fischer and Simon had begun as a private project a year before Thalion existed and which took another year and a half of full-time work to finish. ACE promised readers an epic “which puts even the likes of Ultima and Dungeon Master to shame”. Fischer later admitted that the long development had been a lesson: he had changed assembler halfway through and had to convert all the code, and a game designed three years earlier was no longer up to date.
Thalion’s music came from the same scene. Jochen Hippel wrote for its games, and The One referred to him in 1992 simply as “Thalion musician Jochen Hippel”.
Chambers of Shaolin
The early action games reached Britain through Grandslam. ACE reviewed Chambers of Shaolin in April 1990 and singled out its structure:
Instead of ignoring the learning curve, German software house Thalion has actually made a feature of it.
The game runs in two halves. First the player builds up a fighter’s skills in six training chambers, each devoted to an ability such as balance, speed or strength. Then the fighter is saved to disk and entered in the contest proper. ACE’s reviewer found the animation only adequate and the sound uneventful. But “once you’ve played through the Chambers once, you’ve got two excellent games which are practically independent of one another”.
No Second Prize and Lionheart
In 1990 ACE named No Second Prize as perhaps Thalion’s most exciting project, a motorbike race with “revolutionary fast solid 3D graphics”. The routines were already finished, and it was expected that autumn. It came out at the end of 1992. Its programmer was Christian Jungen, a Swiss who had become fascinated with 3D after buying Elite and who, The One reported, gave up a computer science course at ETH Zurich after half a year to program 3D for games.
Lionheart (1993) was a large, colourful Amiga platform game drawn by the Dutch artist Henk Nieborg and programmed by the Austrian Erwin Kloibhofer. Kloibhofer told Amiga Joker how they came to Thalion. They knew each other from demo parties, “the scene is international, after all”. Kloibhofer left home for the Netherlands, where the two made a small platform game called Ghost Battle and offered it to Thalion. He remembered it as never released, “but it got us jobs in Gütersloh” (in translation). Yet Amiga Power reviewed Ghost Battle in August 1991 as a Thalion release, “Out now”, credited to Kloibhofer and Nieborg. Lionheart followed.
Amberstar and Ambermoon
Thalion’s role-playing games grew alongside its action games. Amberstar was published for the ST in 1992 and Ambermoon, its sequel, for the Amiga in 1993, with Erik Simon as producer. In a 1993 interview with The One Simon described the German market. Simulations and huge role-playing games, he said, were well accepted by German players, while action games such as Lionheart had done well there only for a short time. Piracy, he added, was “constantly pushing us towards the PC”. Ambermoon had special routines to speed up its texture-mapped dungeons on the Amiga 1200.
The One summed up the company’s attitude in the same feature: “No-one involved has become immensely rich or drives a Porsche.”
Blue Byte, and bankruptcy
The end came quickly. In February 1994 Amiga Format and CU Amiga reported that Erik Simon, Jurie Horneman, Thorsten Mutschall, Christian Jungen and Tobias Franz, the team behind games from Dragonflight to Ambermoon, had left Thalion at the end of 1993 for the German publisher Blue Byte. Amiga Format found Thalion’s British office still “bullish” about the company’s future. In May 1994 Amiga Joker reported that, with the programmers gone to Blue Byte, CD conversions of No Second Prize, Lionheart and Ambermoon were being made in England. In June it told a reader that Thalion, “despite some very successful products”, had gone bankrupt (in translation). By the end of the year Kloibhofer and Nieborg were working with Psygnosis on The Misadventures of Flink.
Released source code
In May 2023 Jurie Horneman, who had programmed both role-playing games, published the surviving source code of Amberstar and Ambermoon on GitHub, together with the games’ German and English texts and development documents. The Ambermoon code lacks the base libraries for loading files, drawing graphics and managing memory, he wrote, but the majority of the gameplay logic is there. The repositories carry no licence.
Sources
- ACE issue 29, February 1990, p. 9: company profile (“ex-hackers”; set up in 1988; “the underground subculture of the games hacking and cracking”; co-founder Erik on the ex-crackers; Gütersloh; the Silmarillion; Dragonflight, Chambers of Shaolin, Seven Gates of Jambala and No Second Prize).
- ACE issue 31, April 1990, pp. 80 and 83: Grandslam/Thalion’s Seven Gates of Jambala and Chambers of Shaolin reviews.
- ACE issue 37, October 1990, p. 59: Dragonflight.
- Amiga Joker, April 1990, p. 8: Ariolasoft’s Thalion press day.
- The One issue 36, September 1991, p. 28: German software houses (Thalion, Gütersloh, “set up three years ago”).
- ST Magazine (France) issue 56, November 1991, pp. 68–70: “Demos: Schpetzial TEX” (The Exceptions; interviews with Udo Fischer and Michael Raasch; Jochen Hippel and Erik Simon); quotations translated.
- The One issue 40, January 1992, p. 91: “Thalion musician Jochen Hippel”.
- Amiga Power issue 4, August 1991: Ghost Battle review (publisher Thalion; authors Erwin Kloibhofer and Henk Nieborg; “Out now”).
- Amiga Power issue 20, December 1992, pp. 62–63: No Second Prize review (Thalion, £25.99; Christian Jungen).
- The One issue 53, February 1993, pp. 34–36: Ambermoon preview (Erik Simon, producer). The One issue 54, March 1993, p. 59: Lionheart review.
- The One issue 58, July 1993, pp. 24–25: interview with Erik Simon and Christian Jungen (founding in October 1988; Dragonflight’s development; the Porsche; the German market; piracy; the Amiga 1200; biographies).
- Amiga Format issue 56, February 1994, p. 16: “Programmers desert Thalion”. CU Amiga, February 1994, p. 14: the team moving to Blue Byte from 2 January 1994.
- Amiga Joker, May 1994, p. 14 (programmers at Blue Byte; CD conversions in England); June 1994, p. 24 (letters: Thalion bankrupt); December 1994, pp. 72–73 (The Misadventures of Flink; “three questions to Erwin Kloibhofer”). Quotations translated.
- Jurie Horneman, “Amberstar and Ambermoon source material released”, Intelligent Artifice, 14 May 2023 (web, secondary), and the repositories https://github.com/jhorneman/amberstar and https://github.com/jhorneman/ambermoon (Amberstar for the Atari ST, 1992; Ambermoon for the Amiga, 1993). https://intelligent-artifice.com/2023/amberstar-ambermoon-source-material-released/