“Visually, it knocks hell out of any other game,” Amiga Power said of Lionheart in February 1993, and it listed the reasons: “a couple of hundred colours on screen, parallax on practically every single line of the screen, and some of the best character animation this side of Prince of Persia.” The graphics were Henk Nieborg’s. A Dutch artist who had started out drawing with a joystick, he went on to give Psygnosis’s Mega Drive platformer The Misadventures of Flink backgrounds that made Edge think it was looking at a Super Nintendo game. More than 25 years later he was still drawing for new games on the Mega Drive.
Fast facts
- From: the Netherlands.
- Partner: the Austrian programmer Erwin Kloibhofer, whom he met through the demo scene.
- Thalion: Ghost Battle (1991) and Lionheart (1993), Amiga; intro and ending graphics for Ambermoon.
- Psygnosis: The Misadventures of Flink (Mega Drive and Mega-CD, 1994; Amiga CD32, 1994); The Adventures of Lomax (PlayStation, 1996).
- Later: pixel art for Contra 4 and WayForward’s Shantae games; Xeno Crisis (Bitmap Bureau, 2019); Tiny Thor.
A joystick and a black-and-white television
Nieborg has said that in 1985 he could be found “pixeling with my joystick on a black and white TV”, using Koala Paint and a Suzo joystick. He came into games through the demo scene. Erwin Kloibhofer, an Austrian programmer, told Amiga Joker in 1994 that the two knew each other “from old demo days” (“the scene is international, after all”). Kloibhofer moved to the Netherlands, and together they made a small platform game called Ghost Battle and offered it to the German publisher Thalion. It got them both jobs at Thalion in Gütersloh (quotations translated).
Kloibhofer remembered Ghost Battle as never released, but Amiga Power reviewed it in August 1991 as a Thalion release, credited to Kloibhofer and Nieborg. Stuart Campbell’s review was not kind. He allowed it “pretty graphics” and “reasonably slick presentation”, but the “utterly execrable animation, featuring the worst jumping and ladder climbing I’ve seen in a very long time”, the slow play and the enemies that appeared from nowhere made it “an utterly tedious game”.
Lionheart
Lionheart was the pair’s answer. Kloibhofer and Michael Bittner programmed it, Nieborg drew it, Thalion’s Erik Simon designed it and Matthias Steinwachs wrote the music and effects. It was a scrolling sword-fighting platform game for the Amiga, needing at least a megabyte of memory, and the German Amiga Games expected it for Christmas 1992. It came out early in 1993. Amiga Power’s Mark Ramshaw argued with himself in his review, a “Nice Mark” against a “Nasty Mark”, and Nice Mark won: “Some of the best graphics and sound you’re ever likely to see on the humble A600.” He had two complaints. The gameplay “perhaps doesn’t quite match the level of technical excellence”, and the monsters on the early levels “tend to blend in with the backgrounds”.
With Lionheart finished, Nieborg moved on to Thalion’s role-playing game Ambermoon. A preview of the game in 1992 reported that, until recently busy with Lionheart’s graphics, he was now drawing its opening and closing sequences.
Flink, on the Mega Drive
Thalion was in trouble by 1992. “Me and Erwin wrote a letter, including a demo disc from Lionheart, to several big companies,” Nieborg recalled in 2016. Psygnosis offered them the chance to make a game for Sega’s Mega Drive rather than the Amiga. Nieborg found the console suited to the work: “The console hardware was designed for action games like Flink. The Amiga had quite a few limitations compared to all the hardware sprites and different background layers you had on the Sega Mega Drive.”
In The Misadventures of Flink the hero rescues his land’s five leaders, imprisoned in crystals by an evil wizard, mixing spells from ingredients he finds on the way. Its credits give Nieborg “ideas and game-concept, drawing all graphics in the game, designing and editing all 62 levels”. Previewing it in June 1994, Edge called it “a genuinely wonderful-looking game, with detailed sprites and smooth animation. But it’s the backgrounds that really make the game stand out: the use of colour is so exceptional you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a SNES game.” It was published in Europe in 1994 on cartridge and on Mega-CD, which added two stages and a CD soundtrack. An Amiga CD32 version followed before Christmas. Amiga Joker’s reviewer praised Nieborg’s “extremely detailed, parallax-scrolling landscapes with their wonderful colour gradients” and the expressions of Flink and the rest of the cast (translated).
Lomax and after
Psygnosis owned Lemmings, and Kloibhofer and Nieborg’s next game was a spin-off from it: The Adventures of Lomax (1996), for the PlayStation and PC, in which a knightly lemming uses a set of “power-giving helmets” to free his enchanted friends. Retro Gamer later remembered its “stunning Rayman-esque visuals”, and called it “typical of the duo’s previous games, boasting stunningly vibrant visuals coupled with solid gameplay”.
Nieborg went on to work as a freelance artist. He drew for Contra 4, and worked with WayForward to produce “pixel art and assets” for Shantae: Risky’s Revenge and Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse. When Bitmap Bureau made Xeno Crisis, a new shooting game for the Mega Drive released in 2019, it was “enlivened enormously by veteran artist Henk Nieborg’s detailed sprite work”, Wireframe wrote, and the magazine counted it among the Mega Drive homebrew games whose graphics were “on a par (if not superior) to those seen in games released in the console’s heyday”. In 2020 Wireframe was looking forward to Tiny Thor, a pixel-art platform game drawn by Nieborg with music by Chris Huelsbeck, and introduced him as an artist who “has been creating stunning video game graphics since the late eighties”.
Asked about his eye for detail, Nieborg was matter-of-fact: “I always had an eye for detail on anything, really; it’s just the way I am. So, it’s not difficult for me at all.”
Sources
- Amiga Power issue 4, August 1991: Stuart Campbell’s Ghost Battle review (Thalion; authors Erwin Kloibhofer and Henk Nieborg).
- PC Games (Germany), special issue 1 (role-playing), 1992: Ambermoon preview and team list (Henk Nieborg, graphics: after Lionheart, the opening and closing sequences).
- Amiga Games (Germany), October 1992: Lionheart preview (programmer Erwin Kloibhofer, artist Henk Nieborg; 1 MB needed; due for Christmas).
- Amiga Power issue 22, February 1993: Mark Ramshaw’s Lionheart review (credits; colours, parallax and animation; “the humble A600”).
- Edge issue 9, June 1994, p. 37: Flink preview (Mega Drive; Psygnosis; credits).
- The One issue 73, October 1994: Flink CD32 preview (Erwin Kloibhofer, programming; Henk Nieborg, graphics).
- Amiga Joker (Germany), December 1994, pp. 72–73: The Misadventures of Flink CD32 review, and “three questions to Erwin Kloibhofer” (the demo scene, Ghost Battle, Gütersloh, Lionheart, Psygnosis after Thalion’s collapse, the Mega Drive original). Quotations translated.
- Retro Gamer issue 108, November 2012: The Adventures of Lomax, by “Flink creators Erwin Kloibhofer and Henk Nieborg”. Retro Gamer Collection volume 6, 2012: Lomax “co-written by Erwin Kloibhofer and Henk Nieborg”.
- Wireframe issue 33, February 2020: Xeno Crisis review (Bitmap Bureau). Issue 43, September 2020: Tiny Thor preview. Issue 70: Mega Drive homebrew feature (Xeno Crisis).
- Ken Horowitz, “Interview: Henk Nieborg (Pixel Artist)”, Sega-16, 7 April 2016 (web, secondary): the Lionheart demo disc and Thalion in 1992; Psygnosis and the Mega Drive; the Shantae games and Contra 4; the eye for detail. https://www.sega-16.com/?p=24715
- “Interview with Henk Nieborg”, NFG World, interview from late 2005, posted 20 August 2008 (web, secondary): pixeling with a joystick in 1985; Koala Paint; Contra 4. https://nfgworld.com/interview-with-henk-nieborg/
- Sega Retro, “The Misadventures of Flink” (web, secondary): European release in 1994; the Mega-CD’s extra stages; the in-game credits; Lomax for PlayStation and PC in 1996. https://segaretro.org/The_Misadventures_of_Flink
- Atarimania, Jochen Hippel’s game list (database, secondary): Ghost Battle, Thalion, 1991. https://www.atarimania.com/pgelstsoft.awp?system=S&type=G&team=2514&step=25