Tyrian (OpenTyrian)

Game: Tyrian (DOS, 1995)

OpenTyrian: a port of Tyrian, the vertical scrolling shooter for DOS developed by Eclipse Software and published by Epic MegaGames in 1995. Jason Emery, who released it as freeware in 2004, gave the OpenTyrian developers a copy of the Tyrian 2.1 source code, which they ported from Turbo Pascal to C and moved to SDL so it runs on modern systems. It has the story mode, one- and two-player arcade modes, and networked multiplayer: a game is started from the command line with the other player’s IP address and, thanks to UDP hole punching, usually no ports need to be opened. v2.1.20260912 (September 13) brought self-contained builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux that already include the game data, and reworked keyboard and mouse input in menus and cutscenes; the latest, v2.1.20260913 (September 14), keeps settings and saves next to the executable if an opentyrian.cfg is already there.

You needNo copy needed: Tyrian 2.1 has been freeware since Jason Emery released it in 2004, and the published builds include its data. If you build it yourself, the get_data.sh script downloads the Tyrian 2.1 data from camanis.net, the site the project points to. Plus Windows (x86-64 or Arm64), macOS (universal), or Linux (x86-64 or Arm64).

How it gets to PC

Port of the released source code

Console

MS-DOS

Original studio

Eclipse Software

Year

1995

Author

opentyrian

Stars

600

Last activity

2026-10-30 · 1 day ago

Latest version

v2.1.20260913 · 2026-09-14

License

GPL-2.0

Language

C