[Ye Olde] Who recognise this image? or: before Twilight meant vampires

Hello everybody!

Yesterday evening while I was wandering around the internet I bumped into an image that melted my heart and made my mind fly back in the late Ninties/first Noughties.

Those dark years when internet (at least in Italy) was more or less fast as a wheelbarrow, when we all were confident that a 56k line could download at 56k, but actually the real download speed was 5-6k, when there were no video-solutions on youtube, no reviews if not on niche magazines, before the birth of file sharing an P2P, when word of mouth ruled over anything else…those dark years were suddenly lighted up by a word:

TWILIGHT

And with Twilight I don’t mean the awful, horrible, stupid movie franchise, neither the book, that honestly I haven’t read and I don’t want to read it anyway, but the name of a game compilation, one of the first game complitaion ever.

I think my readers across the ocean maybe cannot imagine what a Twilight could have been but for sure 90% of the european gamers, especially dutch and italians should remember. Created in 1996 in the Netherlands by a group (I suppose) of hackers, every compilation featured dozens of games, sometimes without sound or without videos to save space on disk.

It’s redundant to say that all of them were 100% illegal.

By the way for most of the young gamers of 90’s this was the only way to collect like 15 games in a shot paying more or less half the price of a single one. Unfortunately (or fortunately, since I know stories of people who got suited and even arrested for having bought/sold the CD) I never owned one of them but a couple of friends did and even now I don’t know how they could have bought them and who could have sold them. The first time I saw the cover and the list of games my eyes went heart-shaped and I couldn’t help falling in love.

Apart from the games, every compilation featured also a collection of utilities such as Adobe Acrobat, software for the drawing, for the photoshop etc… I also find in one of them (the one shown in this post; by the way, the images are courtesy of archive.org) MidiSoft Studio, an amazing program to create MIDIs writing the music on the staff.

Justo for completness here’s the full list of games featured in the compilation:

• Actua Soccer
• Advanced Civilization
• CivNet
• Comix Zone
• Crusader – No Remorse
• Descent – Levels of the World
• Druids – Deamons of the mind
• EF 2000
• Extreme Pinball
• Fatal Racing
• Fifa Soccer 96
• Great Naval Battles IV
• Hexen
• Indy Car 2
• Radix – Beyond the Void
• Rayman
• Screamer
• Table Sports
• TekWar
• Terminator Future Shock
• The DIG
• Turrican 2 – The Final Fight
• WarCraft 2 – Tides of Darkness
• WipeOut
• Zone Raiders

The story of the Dutch releases ended up in 2007 when the creator of the compilation was sentenced to pay more than 1.6 million euro for volountary copyright infringements. This story and in general the story of the other Dutch releases (such as CrazyBytes) isn’t famous and during the war against the copyright infringement was obscured by the most famous battle of all times, against Napster so the “poor” Twilight was almost completely forgotten and even if you look online you will find poor informations about it and if you google “twilight dutch” the possibility to find the dubbed version of the vampire “movie” is very high.

Another reason why I hate the bloodsucking saga…

If you have memory of these incredible complilations feel free to comment and if you want, as always, you can post a picture under this Facebook post.

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