Found a wonderfully awkward "Making of Solstice" video from 1989.

I'm sure some of you fine folks remember playing Solstice: The Quest for the Staff of Demnos for NES back in the day. I spent a lot of time on this game as a kid and was absolutely awful at it. It was the first Isometric game that I ever played and controls never really sunk in. To this day, even with cheat codes I've never beaten it. But for whatever reason, the music popped into my head and I decided to look for it on youtube (link here) for a bit of nostalgic glory when I stumbled across this amazing little gem. Apparently the team that made the game did a making of video that you could mail in for.

The team is clearly not very comfortable in front of a camera and it's shot like a bad public access piece, but it's super fascinating in a lot of ways. First I'm not surprised that developers had the idea to do a "making of" video all the way back then. This has become pretty common place nowadays, but is never not appreciated by folks like me. Second it shows prototype versions, music creation software, and a NES development console. Pretty freaking rad! Anyway, here's the video:

Next time Giant Bomb decide to do something similar to Building A Bastion, they maybe should take some notes for this... by that I mean make it look like it was cheaply made in the late 80's.

And remember kids!

Solstice... A new game to remember...

Solstice (and Equinox to a lesser extent) is one of those games that really deserves an Encylopedia Bombastica. They tried to do a sort-of 3D action adventure way... way, way, way, before it's time. Very cool stuff, thanks for sharing!

Now that was a game from my early 90's childhood, I could never get far into the game but it was still so fascinating with it's isometric gameplay and atmospheric music. I bought that game few months ago again after a decade and half since my NES died and it's still pretty good, has this stat after you die of how much of a percentage of rooms you cleared sought of like Symphony of the Night.

The two things I recall from my Solstice experience as a child:

1. That game is insanely hard and I never even came close to beating it.

2. The music is phenomenal.

After looking at a walkthrough of Solstice on Youtube a while back I no longer feel bad about never having beat it as a kid. That game was fucked!

Oh man the music in Solstice is still some of my favorite game music. It almost sounds like something that should be coming out of a Commodore 64.

@bobafettjm: I can't believe the composer was still a teenager when he wrote it.

Solstice is dope as hell. I couldn't make heads or tails of it when I was little, but I recently beat it (without a walkthrough) and it holds up pretty well.