Balldour

Balldour is a one-man DOS shoot-'em-up from 1994, written in Borland C++ with assembly by a Norwegian computer student who wanted, in his own words, simple good old C64-like games on the PC.

The result matches the intention. The whole thing is 207 KB, small enough to leave plenty of room on a floppy, and it plays more like the arcade titles its author grew up with than like the bigger PC productions of the mid-1990s.

Outside Norwegian shareware circles almost nobody has heard of it, which puts it squarely in the large group of domestic releases that never crossed the border. On OldGame.cz you can play it directly in your browser.