Moon Child and Hoi has become stars in one of perhaps the most fascinating gaming story of 2026. We have interviewed Metin Seven from developer Team Hoi.
I’ve loved the Amiga platform game Hoi ever since I first tried the free Hoi AGA Remix edition back in the nineties. It also seems to have a solid reputation among other Amiga fans, but in the rest of the gaming world it has remained largely unknown.
This has unfortunately been a recurring theme for the games developed by the Dutch studio Team Hoi. Bad luck with publishers who turned out to be either untrustworthy or financially unstable (or both) meant their games failed to make much of an impact. It culminated with Hoi’s PC-based successor, Moon Child, which was released just as their publisher was winding down its games business and, as a result, only came out in the Netherlands.
Viral on Bluesky
But now, things are suddenly quite different. Out of the blue, Moon Child and Hoi recently went viral on Bluesky and were discovered and embraced by a whole new generation of players and game developers. Finally, Team Hoi and their games received the recognition they had deserved all along.
I first got in touch with Team Hoi’s graphics artist and designer, Metin Seven, around the year 2000, and interviewed both him and programmer/designer Reinier van Vliet for a project I was working on at the time. Back then, our main focus was Hoi and the story behind the game.
With everything that’s happened lately, it was high time to catch up with Metin again. In this interview, we talk about Team Hoi’s history, and of course he also shares the story of the last few months’ events from his perspective.
- This article is also available in Norwegian
About Team Hoi
Some introductions are probably in order – who are you guys, and how did you get into making games in the first place?
Hi, we’re the Team Hoi game developers, consisting of Reinier van Vliet (coder and game designer), Ramon Braumuller (music composer) and me, Metin Seven (game designer and graphic artist).
Can you tell us a little about what you did before Hoi?
Each of us loved playing games on early 8-bit game consoles when we were kids (Atari 2600, CBS ColecoVision, hand-held LCD games, …) and we all owned a Commodore 64 (128 in my case). We got to know each other in the early years of the Amiga, in the second half of the 1980s, and formed a game development team called Soft Eyes/SoftEyes (that later became Team Hoi).
An Amiga game named Ragnov was the first title we developed, in the late 1980s. It featured omnidirectional parallax scrolling and a split-screen two-player mode. We released a demo version of Ragnov, and I sent that to potential publishers, but the game’s development was discontinued when the source files were lost due to a backup accident. It would have been nice if we could have completed Ragnov, but we paid homage to it in level 3 of our platform game Hoi. Even Ramon’s music for Ragnov was remixed for Hoi level 3.
Our next game was a shooter named Venom Wing, published by the British publisher Thalamus in 1990. I made part of its graphics, but the game was mainly a project of our second coder, Pieter (Peter) Opdam. He migrated to the UK not long after Venom Wing, to work for Team 17, known for the Worms game series.
We also developed two music editors: SIDmon and Digital Mugician, featuring live-generated synth sounds next to digitized sounds, resulting in music module files that required little RAM, which was very useful for games, because graphics and digitized audio required a lot of RAM. Digital Mugician was also published by Thalamus, and was used by other Amiga game developers at the time as well. For example, Codemasters used Digital Mugician for The Quest of Agravain.
We talked a fair bit about Hoi in our last interview. But it’s kind of important for the story, so can you give us an introduction to the game? What inspired you to create it?
Following Ragnov and Venom Wing, Reinier and I really wanted to create a cute, cheerful, cartoon-style platform game. We wanted it to be a tribute to our favorite childhood games. We also wanted it to have lots of variation, because most gameplay was/is based on just a few simple principles, and usually only the graphics change across the game, but the challenges remain more or less the same. We wanted to keep surprising our players with new challenges throughout the game. No dull repetition.
And where did the main character, Hoi, come from?
«Hoi» means «Hi» in Dutch. Back in the 1980s and 1990s I used to have a cat named Mickey. When the cat entered my room, I always greeted the cat by saying «Hoi Mickey!» As time went by, «Mickey» was left out, and the cat’s name simply became «Hoi.»
We needed a cute main character for Hoi, and one day I was drawing a cute dino-like character I had in my mind using Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. Reinier was sitting in my room, reading a magazine. When I showed the character to him, he and I simultaneously said «Hoi!» Our game title was born.
Publisher troubles
Now we get to the publisher bit. What happened there? And have you ever sought out or gotten any kind of explanations?
The US-based publisher Innerprise, formerly known as Discovery Software, wanted to publish our Hoi platform game. When we had finished 60 percent of Hoi, Innerprise asked us to send it to them for evaluation purposes. Not long after that, a friend of mine called me to say that he had just received Hoi, cracked by the Fairlight group. The 60-percent version of Hoi turned out to have leaked from the Innerprise office. When we asked Innerprise about this, they promised to find out who was responsible, but our trust was gone. Hoi’s premature release in the piracy circuit was a major disillusion after the hard work we had spent on it, and we set out to find a new publisher.
The also US-based Hollyware, formerly known as Micro-Illusions, was interested, and in the summer of 1992, Hoi was finally released worldwide on two diskettes, after a delay of more than half a year. The UK-based The Software Business distributed Hoi in Europe. Hollyware sent us a $ 200 cheque «for the release celebration party!» After that we never received anything again. No royalties, while we read multiple positive reviews in the international games magazines of that time. The British magazine The One gave Hoi an overall score of 90 percent, for example.
The reviews provided pride and some consolation, but it became harder for us to continue developing games without earning anything. In the mean time, I had started working on an animated children’s series in an Amsterdam-based animation studio during daytime, and spent the evenings on game development. When it became fully clear that we wouldn’t be paid for Hoi, we decided to release a slightly enhanced version of the game for free (the Hoi AGA Remix), so anyone in the Amiga community could enjoy the game.
Many years after this, I read that Micro-Illusions got in financial trouble when a game license deal with the Hanna-Barbera animation studio was cancelled, and restarted publishing games as Hollyware. But that is no excuse for ripping off three youngsters by profiting from their hard work of course.
I guess there were lots of unreliable publishers at the time. As there was no internet yet, you couldn’t so a search for names of companies or persons.
Then it happened again, with your next game, Clockwiser. What motivated you to continue making games after two such punches to the gut?
Well, actually, we got a total of six punches in the gut…
The first time we didn’t got paid was after we delivered the final version of our SIDmon Amiga music editor to the German Turtle Byte publisher. We even traveled to a computer show in Cologne where he would be, to approach him about the lack of payment, but we couldn’t find him.
The second gut punch was: not only did the Turtle Byte guy not pay us for SIDmon, he also hired an external coder to develop a SIDmon sequel without our consent, which was sold in computer stores too.
The third punch was the above-mentioned Innerprise premature Hoi release incident.
Hollyware’s lack of payment for Hoi was the fourth punch.
Rasputin not paying us for Clockwiser was the fifth punch.
Valkieser canceling the publishing department that would publish Moon Child beyond the Netherlands was the sixth gut punch.
Moon Child
Can you tell us about the development of Moon Child? How did that project start, and evolve over time?
I remember making the first version of the Moon Child character in 1991. I guess it was somewhere between the Innerprise setback and finding Hollyware.
We wanted to create a new platform game following Hoi (which hadn’t been released yet, but was finished in the mean time), and initially I had Hoi in mind as the protagonist. But somewhere in 1991 I discovered a relatively obscure Capcom arcade game called Midnight Wanderers, one of three games that were collectively called Three Wonders. I got inspired by the magical nightly atmosphere and gorgeous graphics of Midnight Wanderers, and it pushed me into a different direction, a bit darker and moodier than the bright, cheerful world of Hoi.
I’m also a big fan of Capcom’s Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins game series, which has a more or less similar nightly atmosphere in a cartoonish style as Midnight Wanderers. That’s the direction I wanted to take, and I created the Moon Child elf character, which was more fitting than Hoi for the magical, nightly, fairy-tale like atmosphere.
At the time, Sonic the Hedgehog’s speedy gameplay made Mario look like a snail, so we decided to give Moon Child some swiftly scrolling gameplay too. But the version of Moon Child I had at the time had a hood, a waving hair tuft and more characteristics that didn’t match the game’s speedy scrolling. The character was designed to walk, not run. So I streamlined Moon Child, giving him a red onesie, and removing the hood and hair. My initial Moon Child elf character design got a small cameo in the first level of the final version of Moon Child.
When we had reached a first stage of Moon Child development for the Amiga in 1994, Commodore went bankrupt, forming dark clouds above the Amiga’s future. In need of an income, Reinier decided to start working as a coder for a multimedia company called Valkieser, and we asked the management if they would be interested in a game development division. They turned out to be interested, and I was also employed. We started a semi-independent games department in 1995, reinitiated Moon Child development for Windows 95, and hired Ramon as a freelancer to keep composing our game music. The mid-1990s graphics cards allowed us to increase Moon Child’s resolution to 640 x 480 pixels and establish smooth scrolling, while other 2D games were still released in low resolution at the time, and often suffered from jerky scrolling.
Around that time, we decided to release the Amiga version of Moon Child as a demo to the Amiga community, featuring a title tune Ramon had made using a special seven-channel version of our Digital Mugician music editor. The tune included Moon Child related lyrics Ramon had sung, recorded and digitized. More than thirty years later, that version of the Moon Child soundtrack became an important igniter of the Moon Child meme explosion on Bluesky!
Despite your best efforts, Moon Child also sunk (mostly) without a trace – what happened, and how did you feel about it?
The Windows version of Moon Child was released in 1997, but Valkieser had heavily invested in Philips CD-i authoring hardware and software, which turned out to be a flop. This resulted in a range of employees being fired, and Valkieser’s publishing department was discontinued as well, causing Moon Child’s release to remain stuck in the Netherlands.
We were disappointed by this turn of events, and subsequently, Reinier and I started working for a different multimedia company, where we made some advergames and CD-ROM software. But it marked the end of Team Hoi as an active game development team. Our mutually inspiring cooperation kept us going for for around ten years, but in the end, the repeated setbacks forced us to find other ways of earning a living than game development.
What happened on Bluesky?!?
But now … it’s back! So this is the completely surreal bit. What on Earth happened?
Haha, yeah, it’s been a roller-coaster ride. In April 2026, I submitted the Amiga demo version of Moon Child to the Games That Weren’t website. GTW covered Moon Child in an article and video, featuring the Moon Child title song with extended lyrics («It’s Moon Child, woh-oh oh ooh! You’ve got the power to be his friend!» and some other sound samples). Those lyrics and the overall retro atmosphere of the Amiga demo version caused Moon Child to go viral on the Bluesky social media platform.
The Moon Child and Hoi game characters swiftly became well-known among the new generation of gamers and game developers. A wave of memes, tribute videos and fan art followed, and various game streamers played Moon Child on Twitch and YouTube, including the popular Vinny Vinesauce. This turned Moon Child into Bluesky’s first big, well-known meme. It was even speculated that the Moon Child craze caused Bluesky to go down for a while in mid-April, although Bluesky’s official explanation was a DDoS attack.
A selection of the Moon Child and Hoi fan art has been added to the Moon Child Archive‘s file directory. The artist’s name is included in each filename.
To show our appreciation to the gamer and game dev community, we decided to release the source files and assets of Moon Child ─ and later also Hoi ─ resulting in several game community mods, remixes, conversions and Moon Child/Hoi cameos in other games. Moon Child and Hoi were also widely adopted as a character in the popular Tomodachi World game, and a Moon Child and Friends Discord and Moon Child speedrun site were started, among other Moon Child related game community initiatives.
How did you find out about it? How did you react?
More and more people approached me with messages like «You’ve got to see what’s happening with Moon Child on Bluesky!» I had discontinued my Bluesky account a while ago, because I was more active on Mastodon and got tired of cross-posting, but I decided to re-register a Bluesky account (via Eurosky) and check out what was going on. Once I re-entered Bluesky, I witnessed a tsunami of Moon Child memes, fan art, videos, you name it. I couldn’t believe my eyes, haha. And a funny thing was that many people didn’t even know that Moon Child was an actual game. They thought it was just some new viral meme character!
Do you have any ideas why it happened? I mean, there’s SO MUCH STUFF on social media these days, and suddenly this thing goes viral – obviously luck must have played a huge role, but do you have any thoughts on why the game appeals so much (and to such a «young» audience)?
I have got a strong impression that Moon Child and the hopeful lyrics of the Amiga demo version’s title song («You’ve got the power to be his friend!»), combined with the open source re-releases of our games, really resonate with the new generation of gamers and game developers. I guess our old games provide a comforting time warp to a tech era without AI, gargantuan data centers, manipulative social media algorithms, «smart» appliances spying on you, large-scale cybercrime and privacy concerns, gazillions of satellites circling Earth, and so on.
Despite the 1980s and 1990s having been somewhat of a Wild West of the digital revolution, I also find myself longing for a return to those less complicated technology times, when you were in control of your computer, instead of the other way round.
Have these events changed your perception of Moon Child (and Hoi)?
To some extent, definitely. I’ve always regretted that our games remained stuck in a niche bubble because of the publisher setbacks. I’ve never doubted about the potential of our games. And all of a sudden, decades later, a new generation of gamers (re)discovered Moon Child and Hoi, and express lots of appreciation for our games and the characters. It’s really heart-warming after all the bad luck we had during our game dev years.
After the game went viral, you decided to make it open source – how come? Did you ever consider trying to get it rereleased on Steam or GOG instead?
The thought of selling it through Steam or something like that has crossed my mind. People even repeatedly asked for it, but I think it fits the spirit of Moon Child and Hoi to not exploit them commercially. And the gesture turned out to be very much appreciated…
Bluesky user @chromadeline.newgrounds.com wrote: «Moon Child becoming a huge meme overnight, and then the original devs finding out and being the chillest people ever RELEASING ALL OF THE SOURCE FOR FREE is genuinely the best possible outcome.»
Bluesky user @jupitism.bsky.social wrote: «The Moon Child and Hoi revival is quite possibly the most joyous thing in video games of the last decade, and to see old devs immediately be like ‘yes how can we get this open source a.s.a.p.’ and not want to make 3 billion dollars on it just makes me really happy and hopeful.»
Such responses really made our open source releases gesture worthwhile. It’s comparable with reading positive magazine reviews of Hoi and Clockwiser in the 1990s: although we didn’t get paid, we did get appreciated worldwide. Money is fleeting, sincere appreciation makes you grow.
What now?
And then you followed up with a free Windows version of Hoi. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Reinier has always disliked Hoi being trapped inside the Amiga hardware environment. The revival of Moon Child motivated him to develop a so-called transpiler, allowing him to convert Amiga 68000 CPU Assembly code to portable C code, making it possible to compile Hoi for modern operating systems. It required a lot of effort to get the transpiler working properly, but it freed Hoi from the Amiga bubble, and Reinier released the transpiler code as open source as well, so other Amiga developers can also convert their Amiga productions, if they’ve preserved the source files and assets.
As I write this, we are also preparing our Clockwiser puzzle game for an open source re-release, aided by the transpiler.
You can find our releases in Reinier’s Bitbucket repository: https://bitbucket.org/rhinoid
Will we ever see a new Team Hoi game?
Time will tell! Reinier might not have the time for it, with his demanding daytime job. Maybe it could become a community effort, or a cooperation with new generation indie game developers. Regardless of what the future will bring, we’re much enjoying the revival of our games and characters.
I’d like to thank Metin Seven for taking the time to answer my questions! If you’d like to try Moon Child yourself, the best way is to download Moon Child FE from Itch.io.
Be sure to read my old interview with him and Reinier van Vliet for more on the Team Hoi story.
I also wrote a retrospective on Hoi earlier this year (a little before everything that happened on Bluesky). You can read it here (it’s in Norwegian). Also somewhat relevant is last year’s interview with Frank Gasking of Games that Weren’t.
While Spillhistorie.no is a Norwegian website, we do have a lot of interesting content in English, including interviews with a number of developers of classic games. If you wind up enjoying our content, a donation at Ko-Fi is much appreciated.