Classic 90s platformer Moon Child gets the source code released and a modern port

Moon Child has a bit of a colourful history starting off as an Amiga game that never released, and eventually saw a limited PC release but it has returned.

From the Archive page:

From 1995 to 1997, Reinier and Metin ran a semi-autonomous game development department, employed by the Dutch multimedia company Valkieser. Ramon was hired as a freelancer to take care of the music and sound effects.
Moon Child was officially released in the Netherlands in 1997, on CD-ROM in a box. But shortly after the release, Valkieser experienced a financial setback due to a failed investment in Philips CD-i authoring systems and software. This caused the publishing department to be discontinued before Moon Child was released internationally.

Later, Moon Child turned out to have been spread around the world in the piracy circuit, and Metin still receives e-mails every now and then from people around the world who express fond memories of playing Moon Child as a kid.

Moon Child development initially started on the Commodore Amiga (Advanced Graphics Architecture models), and featured the Hoi character from Team Hoi's previous Amiga platform game (1992) as an automated sidekick. Metin's first Moon Child character design dates back to late 1991, when the Hoi game had just been finalized. The developers planned to turn Moon Child into a semi-sequel to Hoi. But Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, and Valkieser demanded a reboot of Moon Child for Windows PCs for understandable commercial viability reasons. A demo of the initial Moon Child AGA Amiga version is included among the available files.

It became something of a weird cult classic. And more recently, there's been a whole lot of memes in various circles about it. So much so that one of the original developers, Metin Seven, re-registered a social media account on Bluesky to bask in all the strangeness going on. And then a few days ago, they released the source code under the open source MIT license.

What makes this even more fun now, is that one of the developers of Distant Illusions "mors" announced on Bluesky they've already created Moon Child FE (Friend Edition). A modern source port designed to be the definitive way to play the classic.

Some differences they list:

• Proper support for the latest Windows versions, as well as Linux
• A full web version that you can play in your browser
• Automatic saving and loading of progress
• Controller support
• Independent input mapping for "Up" and "Jump"
• Fullscreen and windowed display modes
• 50FPS and 60FPS toggle, with Vsync support
• Nice and shimmer-free image scaling
• New "Safe Visuals" mode, which makes the final level slightly easier on the eyes
• Slightly higher quality audio
• Alternate title screen music :D
• Updated credits
• And more!

You can find it on itch.io. It even has a Linux version.