Tyrian 2000: the mining company wants you dead over a rock

A scrolling shooter that swaps the usual space marine for a terraforming engineer — and still spares no one.

A mining engineer, not a marine

You were expecting a quiet life. Blasting rock to clear the way for new settlements on Tyrian sounds like a job for a terraforming engineer, not a space marine — until your friend Buce, a huzundra, turns up dead. Murdered. Microsol, the terraforming company that runs the region, wants you dead too. The reason lies inside the huge rock the two of you found: within it sits Gravitium, a rare and coveted material that exists in commercial quantities only on this planet. Microsol wants that control all to itself, and it will throw everything it has at you.

Eclipse Productions stood on both sides of the counter: it built and distributed Tyrian 2000 with no outside publisher. The showdown with Microsol takes the shape of a vertically scrolling shooter set in science fiction, listed on GOG since December 13, 2010.

A whole closet of weapons, for those who get attached

You start out just trying to survive and end up memorizing which weapon cracks which boss. Reviews have been piling up on GOG since launch, and they keep circling back to the same amazement: the sheer number of ships and weapons to mix and match, the hand-drawn backdrops that change theme with every stage, the enemies that range from a lone fighter to a giant fixed cannon, and secret stages tucked away for anyone who goes looking. The humor of the dialogue comes up again and again in players' accounts. There are two ways to play solo: one in which the ship starts out weak and grows only from what you destroy and pick up along the way, built for anyone chasing a high score, and another that saves and loads your progress, for anyone who wants to see the story through to the end.

One review from November 29, 2012 recounts having to open a configuration file and hand-tune the emulator's resolution and memory to double the frame rate — and even so calls the game exemplary. Another, from November 7, 2023, celebrates being able to steer the ship with the cursor rather than relying on the keyboard alone. A player writing on December 29, 2020 credits the soundtrack to Alexander Brandon and sums the story up as hilarious — but concedes, still within a high rating, that toward the end of the fifth episode the game starts to repeat its formula and grows a little tiring.

Hard enough to push you away, good enough to pull you back

You try, you take a beating, you give up. One review was genuinely harsh — and even that one changes its mind partway through. Written on October 10, 2021, it tells how the player quit after facing several stages in a row on the first attempt: they lacked the reflexes and the patience the game demanded at that moment. The return came only after a long break; this time the campaign went all the way, even if some stages were still described as brutal. What kept this player going to the end was the variety of weapons and equipment, the colorful art, and the soundtrack — enough, by their reckoning, to make up for the tougher stages, even without being the sort of person who usually enjoys this faster, arcade-style pace.

For anyone with patience for hard stages and a stubborn emulator

This never turns into a space-marine game — even with all that arsenal, the player is still the engineer who only wanted to clear a path through the rock. Tyrian 2000 asks for patience on two fronts: with the difficulty of the later stages and with the emulator itself, which sometimes needs manual tweaking before it runs smoothly. Anyone who likes to comb through options, try out every ship, and bank progress across a long campaign will find plenty of reason to come back after the first session — which is exactly what happened to the players who kept returning to write about the game, year after year. But if you want a quick, frictionless session, or if one hard opening stage is already enough to make you quit for good, you won't reach the part where the game pays off: only a long break and a second attempt got the harshest reviewer to change their mind.