Who created the video game IJstijd?

IJstijd was created by Rens van Boxtel, a graphic design student from Den Bosch ('s-Hertogenbosch), the Netherlands. He was 20 years old and developed the game on an MSX2 in 1987, combining his art skills with self-taught programming.

What is the video game IJstijd about?

IJstijd ("Ice Age") is a platformer set during the Little Ice Age in the 17th-century Netherlands. The player controls a young skater named Maartje who must cross frozen rivers and canals to deliver a message between two Dutch towns. The visual style was inspired by the winter landscape paintings of Hendrick Avercamp.

How many copies of IJstijd were sold?

About 200 copies of IJstijd were sold on cassette and floppy disk, mainly through MSX user groups and at the Tilburg MSX fair. It was considered a cult classic within the small Dutch MSX scene.

What makes IJstijd visually distinctive?

IJstijd used the MSX2's expanded color palette to recreate the look of 17th-century Dutch winter landscape paintings. The backgrounds feature frozen canals, bare trees, windmills, and tiny figures skating — directly inspired by the works of painter Hendrick Avercamp.

IJstijd — The MSX Platformer Set in a Frozen Dutch Landscape

The winter landscape paintings of Hendrick Avercamp — those scenes of Dutch life on frozen canals, full of skaters, horse-drawn sleighs, and tiny figures against vast white skies — are among the most beloved images in Dutch art. In 1987, a graphic design student from Den Bosch brought one of those paintings to life as an MSX2 platformer. IJstijd (“Ice Age”) is one of the most visually striking Dutch games of the 1980s.

The Game

IJstijd is a side-scrolling platformer with a simple premise. You play as Maartje, a young girl tasked with delivering an urgent message from one town to another across a frozen Dutch landscape. The catch: the only route is across the frozen rivers and canals, and the ice isn’t always safe.

The game scrolls horizontally through five distinct levels, each representing a stretch of frozen waterway:

De Dorpsgracht — a village canal, relatively safe, introducing basic mechanics
De Rivier — a wide river with thin ice patches that crack under your weight
Het Haarlemmermeer — a vast frozen lake (before it was drained in the 1800s) with howling wind that pushes you sideways
De Vaart — a narrow shipping canal with obstacles and a pursuing wolf pack
De Stadsgracht — the destination town’s moat, guarded by a corrupt tollkeeper

Maartje moves by skating — she has momentum and slides when the player releases the direction key, which makes precise platforming tricky. She can jump over cracks in the ice, duck under low branches, and throw snowballs to stun hazards. The ice mechanics are the core challenge: certain tiles show hairline cracks, and standing on them too long causes Maartje to fall through into the water below.

Hazards include thin ice (visual cues help experienced players spot it), wind gusts during blizzard sections, aggressive geese, and — in later levels — ice fishermen whose holes in the ice create unexpected gaps. Collectible items include koek-en-zopie (the traditional Dutch hot drinks and sweets sold at ice skating events) which restore health, and scattered coins that earn extra lives.

The Developer

Rens van Boxtel was studying graphic design at the Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving (now AKV|St.Joost) in Den Bosch. Unlike most Dutch game developers of the era, his background was in art rather than programming.

“I’d been staring at Avercamp paintings in art history class,” Van Boxtel told us, “and I thought — that’s a game world. All those little figures moving across the ice, the sense of scale, the detail. And the MSX2 had just enough colors to do it justice.”

Van Boxtel’s art training gave IJstijd its distinctive look. Rather than the bright, primary-colored aesthetics typical of MSX platformers, he used muted whites, pale blues, and warm browns to evoke the look of a 17th-century painting. Background details — bare oak trees, distant church steeples, windmills with motionless sails — were drawn with the care of an illustrator, not a programmer.

The programming was harder. Van Boxtel had taught himself MSX-BASIC and was learning Z80 assembly from MSX Computer Magazine tutorials. “The scrolling was terrible at first — incredibly jerky. I rewrote it three times before it ran smoothly enough. The final version uses the MSX2’s hardware scroll registers, which I only discovered existed after months of struggling.”

Development took about eight months. Van Boxtel’s classmates at the art academy tested the game extensively, offering feedback primarily on the visual design. “They had no idea about game design,” Van Boxtel laughed, “but they had very strong opinions about the color palette.”

Distribution

Van Boxtel sold IJstijd through MSX user groups and at the annual MSX fair in Tilburg. Copies were available on both cassette (ƒ15) and 3.5-inch floppy (ƒ20). About 200 copies were sold — a respectable number for the shrinking Dutch MSX market in 1987.

The game earned a small cult following within the MSX community, with several players praising its visual style as the best original art they’d seen on the platform. An MSX Computer Magazine reviewer wrote: “If Hendrick Avercamp had owned a computer, this is the game he would have made.”

After IJstijd

Van Boxtel completed his design degree and went into advertising, eventually founding a small design agency in Eindhoven. He never made another game, though he sometimes creates retro-styled pixel art as a hobby.

“IJstijd was the perfect intersection of my two interests at the time — art and computers,” Van Boxtel said. “I’m proud of it. Especially the backgrounds. I think they hold up.”

Playing It Today

IJstijd has been preserved as a ROM image and runs in openMSX. The visual design is genuinely beautiful by MSX standards — the frozen landscape stretches across the screen with a painterly quality that most 8-bit games never achieved. The skating momentum mechanic takes some getting used to, but once it clicks, there’s a balletic quality to guiding Maartje across the ice.

See also: Kabeljauw — another Dutch MSX game from the late 1980s, and Nachtwacht — a C64 text adventure also set in the Dutch Golden Age.