Twitch streamer Macaw45 recently unearthed a long-lost game called The Golden Flute 4 in an MS-DOS shareware collection, surprising the game's creator, a programmer named Rick Brewster who said he hadn't thought about it in 20 years. Macaw45 streams retro game content for his 11,000 followers, often focusing on obscure titles like those in the DOS collection.
Gaming video and streaming platforms are often sources of odd and interesting discoveries like Macaw45's, but Twitch has made headlines in recent months for a number of big-money deals made to secure more well-known streamers. After Twitch's most popular streamer, Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, left Twitch for Microsoft's Mixer platform in August 2019, many of other top streamers - such as Michael "shroud" Grzesiek and Jack "CouRage" Dunlop - began leaving, as well. Ninja's manager and wife Jessica Blevins later revealed the reason Ninja really left Twitch, saying Twitch was not responding well to the streamer's desire to branch out and continue growing his brand. Similar issues may have had something to do with the other streamers' exodus, but it's also likely that streaming platforms' financial offers play a big role in content creators' decisions to stay or go. In fact, Twitch reportedly just spent millions to keep DrLupo and other popular streamers on the platform.
Through Macaw45's discovery last week, Twitch provided a more wholesome bit of news. About five hours and 20 minutes into a marathon of obscure MS-DOS games, Macaw45 jumped into a game called The Golden Flute 4: The Flute of Immortality, developed by someone named Rick Brewster. Macaw45 had quickly skipped over the game's rudimentary, text-adventure prequel, The Golden Flute, but The Golden Flute 4 intrigued him enough to play it for about 10 minutes. It's a basic, randomized RPG with three-color, Microsoft Paint-like graphics, narrated by what sounded like a young boy. Upon hearing the voice, Macaw 45 speculated that, "OK, we're playing, like, a 12-year-old's game, here." And he was exactly right. After being contacted by one of Macaw45's viewers, Brewster shared the story of how The Golden Flute came to be on Twitter.
The series, which Brewster developed as a child (he was 12 when he made The Golden Flute 4), was based off a book by Delton T. Horn called Golden Flutes & Great Escapes: How to Write Your Own Adventure Games for the Commodore 64. The book included stories and coding instructions for several games, which Brewster modified and iterated on to create his "masterpiece," The Golden Flute 4. Brewster was amazed to see Macaw45 playing these games at all: He only ever made one installable copy, which he mailed to his cousin and never heard about again. Concluding the tweet thread, Brewster guessed his cousin had at some point uploaded the game to a bulletin board system server, and the game eventually made its way to the Frostbyte Shareware Collection on Archive.org.
While Twitch has been home to much controversy in the past - ranging from accusations of animal abuse to strange, sexually suggestive streams - Brewster's story is a pretty incredible reminder of the positive power of the platform, as it allowed him to discover a long-lost artifact of his childhood.
Source: Macaw45/Twitch, Rick Brewster/Twitter