Retro Gaming Australia

Before Warcraft and Diablo were their bread and butter, Blizzard released a number of popular original titles for consoles and PCs. One such game was Blackthorne, an action/adventure game where you played as a warrior looking for revenge on a race of aliens.

Completely out of the blue today, Blizzard has added Blackthorne to Battle.net for download absolutely free. It’s updated to run on modern versions of Windows, but other than that, it maintains its original form. It’s based on the DOS version with the nice pixel art, not the 32X one with the weird pre-rendered look.

It’ll be interesting to see if Blizzard’s other popular mid 90s games such as The Lost Vikings appear soon.

Source: Joystiq

Blackthorne is a pre-Warcraft Blizzard effort that puts you in the shoes of mercenary Kyle Vlaros, who must return to his home planet of Tuul and take on the forces which overthrew his people. This ad is for the original DOS release.

Before they became masters of the real-time strategy and MMO, Blizzard had a history of developing a wider variety of games. One such title was Blackthorne (or Blackhawk for its PAL release), a platformer arguably inspired by Flashback involving a merc named Kyle who travels to the planet Tuul to save his ancestors. The game has two releases – the 1994 SNES and DOS release, and the 1995 32X and Mac release. The key difference is that the latter uses pre-rendered 3D models as sprites.