A forgotten copy of Amberstar resurfaced after 34 years, complete with my handwritten notes

I often wonder, when I buy something to sate my retro and nostalgic urges, about the past life it used to live. 

I’m not even just talking about about gaming hardware, but anything. My favorite book as a child was The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton – weirdly enough they have just, finally made it into a movie. With my OG copy long gone I picked one up a couple of years ago on eBay. Not just any copy, it had to have the same cardboard cover as the one I had as a kid, that’s how nostalgia works, see, you can’t just swap it out with a later edition where the kids names have been changed and modernized for a new audience.

Inside there was a child’s handwriting – “this book belongs to” and then a name. That made it more special to me and got me wondering who that other kid who loved the Faraway Tree was, how their life had turned out, and even, if they was still alive. I’d never know of course, but it is nice to daydream.

I also bought an Amstrad CPC 464 with monitor once, and on the handle of the monitor, ever so faintly was a postcode from Nottingham in the UK, from a time people people used to scratch their postcodes onto goods in case they were ever stolen.

Maybe a little creeplily, I found the address on Google Maps and Street View, and found a little bit of history of where my new, old Amstrad used to live. Again, I wonder who had it and how it had come to arrive with me.

Historic finds

Obviously enough every old item has a history, it’s just they aren’t always so in plain sight, but when they are it magnifies the history, well at least to me.

Before we get going on this one, we are going to need some backstory. Back in 1992 there was a German developer called Thalion. I was Editor of Amiga Action magazine at the time and was friendly with their PR guy – although not friendly enough these days to only remember him as Tony something or other.

Anyway, he asked me if I would like to be involved in bug-testing Thalion’s English version of its massive new RPG, Amberstar and they would give me a few hundred quid for my troubles, so I obviously helped out.

Amberstar was amazing for the time. It came on a stackful of disks and I played it to absolute death, making careful notes along the way, before finally reviewing it, when it was released, for Amiga Action, giving it 91%

Somewhere, for no particular reason, Amberstar and that experience stuck with me. I had a copy of the review spread in my portfolio for many years and I still have the pdfs of it on this very PC I write this on.

I’ve been getting back into Amiga emulation of late and as recently last Saturday night, loaded it up on my MiSTer FPGA, realised I didn’t have a mouse plugged in, and turned it off again. Cool story bro.

Then, completely out of the blue, LinkedIn pinged 

Hi Paul,

I recently got a box of Amberstar game for Amiga, and if I got it right, it was a copy Thalion sent you back then for review (?).  I know it’s 30+ years passed since then, but maybe looking at these few photos you can tell anything more on that? There are also some notes, do they belong to you?

I’m just puzzled a bit if it was really the copy that was sent to you by Thalion or something else. There is also an envelope with the destination of Europress.

Best,

Aleksandr 

The message had made its way to me from a complete stranger in Switzerland, who seemingly had bought my long-forgotten Amiga copy of Amberstar some 34 years since I saw it last and I was a bit taken aback.

Aleksandr has sent me a couple of photographs of the content of the box and seeing my writing on Europress Interactive letter-headed people all these years later a a huge memory-jolt of simpler times.

I quickly responded as I needed to know more about the goings on of this unique copy of an ancient old RPG. We quickly struck up a rapport. Aleksandr, it turns out isn’t a retro collector like me in that he remembers this stuff the first time round, rather he has become fascinated with the Amiga and certains devs of the era many years later and is enjoying it all as a relative youngster. I was keen to find out how much my old freebie copy of Amberstar has set him back.

“It was bought over Amibay for 154 EUR, and the seller told we that he bought it many years ago for the same price,” he told me. Unlike other copies of the game circulating on eBay, and there aren’t many to be fair, this particular Amberstar has its own unique history.

Inside the box were, not only my horrifically scrawled notes, but nine disks, including the original pre-production copies with my name on, as well as the original ones that would have been sent later.

When I first got the game, it would probably have just been the disks and I would have been sent the retail version later. Those memories have long since departed my brain, but somewhere along the way, I must have kept them all together. 

How this box then made its way from Macclesfield in England, through France and ultimately to Aleksandr in Switzerland is a mystery unlikely to be solved. How many pairs of hands has it passed through over the years, only to end up in the hands of a collector who would actually take the time to find me and reach out. Close to four decades later it finally reached somebody who could connect to the original owner.

The long-lost copy of Amberstar now lives in its new loving-home, cleaned, protected and displayed under glass, ensuring its longevity for hopefully many years to come.

Aleksandr dumped the nine disks for me and took photographs of the box and its contents which I am sharing here.

I was interested in what drew him to Thalion and Amberstar in particular, “I’m mostly collecting Sensible Software, Lucasfilm and Thalion games for Amiga, although I have some other few famous titles like Agony or The Defender of the Crown. 

Amberstar’s journey

• 1992 – Thalion sends preview copy to Amiga Action for bug testing.
• 1992 – Reviewed by Paul McNally (91%).
• 1990s – Leaves Europress.
• Unknown – Travels via France.
• 2026 – Purchased by Swiss collector Aleksandr.
• 34 years later – Reunited with its original reviewer.

“I’m only about 2+ years in retro and Amiga specifically, and was fascinated by the hardware/software architecture of the platform while porting some software. 

Since then I’m in, and after half a year I jumped into building Amigas from scratch without any previous soldering background. In 6 months from nothing I was building ReAmiga 4000 🙂 So this hobby expanded quite some when I ended up being equipment and spending nights over!”

The perfect home for Amberstar

I genuinely can’t think of a better place for this particular copy to end up – If I had somehow kept hold of it, it would have ended up in storage most likely, so for it to end up in its own mini collection, on display for its new owner to enjoy is lovely.

“I’m really happy to know that it was your actual writing and the copy of the game 😀 Which means it’s not a usual box, but a great piece of the history. And I can’t believe in such a coincidence!

“I’m also happy to see you are still in the industry and producing nice content,” Aleksandr told me, and it once again made me think how different times are now. With Sony stopping producing physical games, and physical PC games a thing of the past, these stories won’t happen in future, which is why I am telling you this one now.

Every retro game sitting on a shelf somewhere has a story. Most of them we’ll never know. Occasionally, though, one finds its way home, if only for long enough to remind us why physical media mattered to us all in the first place. 

Who was Thalion Software?

Thalion Software was one of the great almost-stories of the 16-bit era: a German developer and publisher whose games were frequently more ambitious, technically accomplished and attractive than their sales figures might suggest.

Founded in Gütersloh in 1988 by figures with roots in the Atari ST demoscene, including Erik Simon and Holger Flöttmann, Thalion assembled a remarkably talented group of programmers, artists and musicians. Its philosophy was simple: squeeze as much as possible from the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, even when conventional wisdom said the hardware had reached its limits.

That technical obsession could be seen across an unusually varied catalogue. Wings of Death filled the comparatively modest Atari ST with sprites and colour, while Enchanted Land used elaborate scrolling and graphical effects rarely associated with the machine. The blisteringly fast motorcycle racer No Second Prize demonstrated Thalion’s ability to handle polygonal 3D, while the lavish Amiga platformer Lionheart remains celebrated for Henk Nieborg’s detailed pixel art and its spectacular use of colour and parallax scrolling.

Thalion was equally important to European computer role-playing games. Dragonflight laid the groundwork in 1990, before Amberstar arrived in 1992 with a huge explorable world, party-based combat, towns, dungeons and a mixture of overhead and first-person exploration. Its Amiga-only sequel, Ambermoon, went further still, introducing a more advanced real-time 3D engine and vastly expanding the world. It was intended to be the second part of a trilogy, but the planned concluding game, AmberWorlds, never appeared.

Critical admiration was not enough to guarantee commercial success. Development costs, piracy, distribution difficulties and the declining European 16-bit computer market all worked against the company. By the end of 1993, much of its development team had departed for Blue Byte, and Thalion was effectively finished by 1994. Some of the technology and ideas developed for the Amber games later helped shape Blue Byte’s 1995 RPG Albion.

Thalion’s life was brief, but its reputation has endured. For many Amiga and Atari ST fans, it represents a period when a small team of demoscene veterans could compete through sheer technical brilliance and ambition.