Rick Brewster, a programmer and the author of Paint.NET (a free photo editing software for Windows computers), was in for a Christmas surprise earlier this week: rediscovering one of his oldest coding projects through a stranger’s Twitch stream. In 1994, Brewster made The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality, a DOS-based game when he was just 12 years old. The game took inspiration from the 1984 book, Golden Flutes & Great Escapes: How to Write Your Own Adventure Games by Delton T. Horn, which taught readers how to write adventure games.
Brewster described his game as “some kind of RPG set in a magical fantasy kingdom” in a Twitter thread. The game runs just like any other RPG, in which the player adventures across a world map full of random encounters with monsters and they can use the money they gather along the way to buy more supplies. After defeating the final boss, the game is over.
Brewster thought his game to be a thing of the past. He only made one installable copy of the game after finishing it, and mailed it to his cousin. Later on, Brewster’s hard drive crashed, taking his games down with it. When he asked his cousin about the game in college, his cousin never responded, so Brewster assumed the copy to be long gone. Little did he know, the file was added to a shareware compilation from 1994, according to Kotaku.
Twitch streamer Macaw, who focuses on old and obscure games, played The Golden Flute IV on his stream on December 23.
Watch 🎄 DOS Archaeology 🎄 from Macaw45 on www.twitch.tv
It came to Brewster’s attention after he received several Tweets asking him about the game.
Brewster made two other games when he was younger: The Golden Flute II and The Golden Flute III. Now that The Golden Flute IV is available for everyone to play, he plans to release the other two, if he can find the disks for them in his parents’ house.
You can play The Golden Flute IV on DOSBox.