Thalion Software

» see thalion.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Thalion was founded in Gütersloh in October 1988 by Erik Simon and Holger Flöttmann, together with Udo Fischer. They came out of The Exceptions, the Atari ST demo group, which matters more than it sounds. The demo scene of the late eighties existed to make a machine do things its manufacturer said it could not do, for no money and no customer. Thalion was an attempt to point that skill at a product.

It worked technically and it kept working. Chambers of Shaolin arrived in 1989. The A320 Airbus simulators ran from 1991. No Second Prize in 1992 put a motorbike on the Atari ST at a frame rate people did not believe. Lionheart in 1993 is still the game Amiga owners point at when they want to end an argument about what the hardware could do, with Henk Nieborg's artwork over Erwin Kloibhofer's code, and review scores that ran from the low eighties into the low nineties.

The role playing games are the part that made the name mean something. Amberstar shipped in 1992 and Ambermoon in 1993, the first two parts of a planned trilogy, with a first person dungeon view sitting inside a top down world map that was enormous for a machine with a floppy drive. Ambermoon is regularly named as one of the best things ever written for the Amiga by people with no reason to be generous about it.

I missed this one on hardware grounds before anything else. In October 1988 I was four years old, and the Atari ST and the Amiga were finished as consumer machines by the time I had a computer of my own. My whole record starts in 1998, on a modem attached to a PC, which is the generation after the one this company lived in. Ambermoon puts up a second wall on top of the first, because it shipped in German and never in anything else, so even a late discovery from Turkey would have run straight into a language barrier.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

The company was eleven full time people in 1992, which was small even then, and it was carrying its own publishing in a market where distribution was being consolidated by companies many times its size. Every Thalion title took longer than budget because the whole point of the company was doing the thing that took longer.

There was also a platform problem nobody could have solved. Thalion was an Atari ST house that moved onto the Amiga, and both machines died commercially inside the window Thalion was betting on them. Ambermoon came out in 1993, which is roughly the last year on earth you could publish an Amiga only role playing game and expect to be paid for it.

~ the day it died ~

By the end of 1994 the developers had left. In December it was announced that Erik Simon and the entire development team were going to Blue Byte, which is not a studio closing so much as a studio walking out the door in one piece. The company itself went bankrupt and closed.

The third Amber game was never made. Blue Byte put out Albion in 1995 with a lot of the same people on it, and it is usually described as the game Ambermoon's sequel would have been if the company had lasted. Holger Flöttmann went on to found Ascaron, which lasted longer and then died its own way.

~ the long tail ~

Thalion has had a stranger afterlife than most dead studios, because its audience never disbanded. The Thalion Webshrine has been collecting the material since the nineties, and an English beta of Ambermoon, version 1.07, surfaced through it in 1998, five years after the German release and long after there was anyone left to sell it.

Then on 14 May 2023, Jurie Horneman, who had written for the games, put the surviving source code for Amberstar and Ambermoon on GitHub. Almost thirty years after a bankruptcy in Gütersloh, the actual thing came back into public hands. Very few dead European studios get that ending, and this one got it because the people who made the games were the kind of people who kept their disks.

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