On Twitch, a player streamed part of a video game called The Golden Flute IV: the flute of immortality. This is how developer Rick Brewster was able to track down this title … which he created then that he was only 12 years old !
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An adventure game that he created at 12
Rick Brewster is no stranger since he participated, as part of a university project, in the creation of Paint.net software, a program free graphic editing which works under Windows. ! We are then in 2004, but the development enthusiast is not at his first try.
Indeed, from his adolescence, he likes to design programs, when he is not playing or when he does not have to fulfill his school obligations. This is how at 12 he manages to imagine an action-RPG adventure game whom he will name The Golden Flute IV: the flute of immortality.
This is a fantastic story, in which the hero, who can be selected from 3 choices (a fighter, a magician or a thief, in the great tradition of this type of software) must browse the map to find and eliminate the one who stole the precious flute that would make him immortal. His route will be strewn with obstacles and the chosen character will have to fight monsters and other demonic creatures to achieve its goal.
The graphics are amazing for a work done so young and if the features are childish, the graphic touch and the overflowing imagination of the young man of then leaves speechless. Everything that makes a good title of the genre answers the call, with character classes, a varied bestiary, a story story and more than acceptable gameplay.
Admittedly, it is not Zelda, but the title of the adolescent is played without displeasure and at the end of the year, one of the players of The Golden Flute IV: the flute of immortalityhas even decided to retransmit his game via the live streaming service Twitch.
Rick Brewster got wind of the thing and discovered that this game, which he created the year of his 12 years and which he thought disappeared forever was in circulation on the Internet!
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From floppy to Twitch
For the developer, this adventure game was lost forever. As he explains, he had made only one copy of his creation at the time in order to send it to one of his cousins, on the other side of the United States. For his part, he kept a version on his hard drive, but it disappeared when the famous disc died.
We were still far from the cloud and the backup of virtual data and it was one of the hazards encountered by the developers!
In order not to lose the fruit of his labor, to which he still devoted 6 months of free time the year of his 12 years (it’s huge, for a child!), Rick Brewster tried to get back in touch with this famous cousin who has the only copy of the game. In vain, what pushed the creator to do the mourning for this achievement.
However, this Action-RPG that he had developed using a novel called Golden Flutes & Great Escapes: How to Write Your Own Adventure Games – a book detailing the steps for creating a good adventure game on the Commodore 64 – was not entirely lost.
It seems that his cousin saved it via a popular storage system at the time (the BBS for bulletin board system), consisting in storing or exchanging files via interposed modems. This ancestor of the cloud would have allowed the title to cross the eras and it finally resurfaced when the buyer of a lot of 3000 floppies found it.
In the middle of December 2019, 25 years after the game was created in 1994Is a streamer specializing in retro game testing (who calls himself Macaw45) who launched a live streaming of this title… to the great surprise of Brewster who saw his creation come out of nowhere. Surprised, he then detailed the story behind his first game on Twitter, for what is almost like a Christmas tale for the 12 year old kid he was.
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