Shin’en Multimedia was founded in 1999 by coders from the Amiga demoscene.
Manfred Linzner, one of the founders, always had the desire to develop an horizontal shoot-em-up for the beloved Amiga computer but after just programming one stage the project was abandoned.
When the Munich based developer decided to focus to the Game Boy Color the idea of creating a shooter was still alive and they started work on it.
According to developer, Iridion was a horizontally scrolling shooter that pushed the Game Boy Color’s hardware to the maximum with never-before-seen (on the Game Boy) graphical effects.
With the help of its proprietary graphics, coding and music tools, Shin’en was promising some impressive technical feats, like 128 colors simultaneously on screen, smooth two-way parallax scrolling, multi-color overlay-sprites, 3D-rendered animation sequences and more elaborate music pieces than most other Game Boy titles.
The game was planned to have 8 stages, 9 bosses and 12 weapons to dispose the enemies with.
Anyway, after just an excellent one level demo, Shin’en, recognizing that original GBC games were almost impossible to market, dropped this project as well.
When Shin’en shifted their focus to the Game Boy Advance, Iridion was their first game to appear on the “new” system.
Iridion 3D was then released in 2001 for the GBA with commercial success and thus began Shin’en technical excellency on Nintendo platforms that continues to this days with the recently released Nano Assault for Nintendo 3DS.
Thanks to Celine for the contribution!
Images (GBC version):
Video from the final GBA version:
