If you're not aware, Daniel Cook released updated versions of the Tyrian Sprites for free use, along with a bunch of other art assets for another game with a similar art style. I have no idea what I'd do with this but the art of Tyrian is a very particular kind I like, a kind of pixel art that belonged in that small window of time for PC games where you had SVGA colour depth but the resolution sat somewhere around 640x480.
I make card and board games, but I don't want to invoke videogame aesthetics unless those aesthetics inform something about the game. So I dunno what I'd do with these yet, but they're interesting.
Tyrian is honestly a secret gem imo; it combines solid shmup gameplay with a pretty good campaign structure of buying upgrades and reading lore documents (diegetic text like emails and news and such), and the art is lovely and the music is rad and by future Unreal and Deus Ex composer Alexander Brandon.
Also hey, you can play it free (data and modern windows executable) via OpenTyrian!
Apparently Tyrian 2000 changed the level format when they added the fifth episode, so regular OpenTyrian doesn't support it, and the fork OpenTyrian2000 is still more or less being updated but hasn't posted a compiled build in two years.
I found it relatively painless to download the source and compile it in Visual Studio, all I really had to do was download SDL and SDL_net and edit a text file to paste the directories I put them in in there, but even just compiling in Visual Studio at all is beyond most people because it's an intimidating, unintuitive interface. If anyone read this far I would be happy to link you the compiled build if you want it.