Game thought lost for 25 years randomly streamed on Twitch

Rick Brewster is probably best known for creating Paint.NET, the popular free alternative to Microsoft Paint, but in 1994 he was a 12-year-old kid taking his first steps into coding. Like many budding programmers of the era, Brewster learned his trade by dabbling in videogame creation via instructions in a book. One such creation was The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality. Thinking it good enough for a relative to enjoy, young master Brewster put his DOS adventure game on a disc and mailed it off to a cousin, never to be seen again.

Imagine Rick Brewster’s surprise when Macaw, a retro streamer, fired up The Golden Flute IV just before Christmas. Here was Brewster’s long-lost game, a game he only ever sent to one person, being played live on Twitch! All its primitive preteen glorious CGA graphics and simple audio back from the past like a “lost, drunken cat” finding its way home.

How did this happen? According to Brewster’s Twitter thread, his cousin cannot remember the details, but he was likely trying to do his cuz a solid and submitted the game to to a BBS where it was later collected by a publisher in the 1994 Cream of the Crop 5 compilation disc. From there, it wound up on FidoNet, and into the Internet Archive, where you can play it too.