About Tyrian and Tyrian 2000

Tyrian is a vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up first released for MS-DOS in 1995. You fly a single fighter through planets, asteroid fields and space stations, and between levels you rebuild that fighter in a shop with the credits you earned.

The game in one minute

• Fly and shoot. The screen scrolls on its own. You dodge enemy fire and terrain while your front gun, rear gun and two sidekicks fire at whatever comes down the screen.
• Shield, then armor. Hits drain your shield first, which recharges from your generator. Once it is down, hits take your armor; lose it all and the level is lost.
• Earn and spend. Destroyed enemies and collected coins and gems add credits. In the shop you buy and sell ships, guns, power levels, sidekicks, shields and generators. See Shop and energy.
• Read the data cubes. The story is told through data cubes picked up during levels and read in the shop.
• Find the secrets. Branching routes, hidden items that warp you to secret levels, the bonus games Zinglon's Ale and Zinglon's Squadrons and title-screen codes reward exploration. See Episodes and Difficulty levels (cheats: secret codes).

Versions of the original

Tyrian grew over several releases. The first shareware version had one episode; the registered release added two more; version 2.0 brought a fourth episode and new modes, including two-player play; and Tyrian 2000 in 1999 added a fifth episode, new ships and the Timed Battle mode. OpenTyrian2000 Enhanced plays the Tyrian 2000 data, so all five episodes are there. The full story of these releases is on the History page.

What the Enhanced Edition adds

OpenTyrian2000 Enhanced Edition keeps the original campaign and builds new features around it:

• Endless Arcade (Endless Mode in the game's menu): levels chained into escalating waves, with combos, a top-10 leaderboard and instant retry.
• Couch co-op in the campaign and in Endless, on two gamepads or a shared keyboard.
• Mutators: optional rules you tick before a run, such as Fast Enemies (1.5x enemy speed), Glass Cannon (2x damage dealt and taken) or Mirror Mode (scripted enemy spawns are mirrored); and bullet time on Left Shift.
• Display options: the original pixels, Sharp pixel art (xBRZ), HD (AI) art and five CRT filters.
• Three music engines (two OPL emulations and MIDI with a SoundFont) and a jukebox.
• Replays you can record and watch, and the original title-screen demos.
• Modding: weapons, ships, enemies and level encounters from a folder of JSON and PNG files, plus a level editor.
• Six languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese.

The details are in the Game modes page and the Player guide.

Numbers from the data

Counted from the Tyrian 2000 data files by the wiki generator. Level maps include secret levels, difficulty variants and the bonus games; weapons and ships include those only found through secret codes. Enemies count the distinct entries of the enemy tables the campaign levels use, without the 319 boss parts.