The lost colony of Alterra is a completely man-made world in a nearby galaxy, abandoned long ago.

Alterra consists of five self-contained habitats, separately bio-engineered by a powerful ecosystem generation network known as a Multiple Organism Unit Link, or MORGUL for short.

Finally, genetic science created a saviour: Turrican, a mutant warrior, bio-engineered for the task of planetary reclamation.

In the meantime, MORGUL has diligently twisted Alterran life forms to his brutal, destructive purposes.

Thus, Turrican's challenges consist of eliminating hostile organisms from Alterra's five multi-level worlds and, finally, destroying the three faces of MORGUL.

Factor 5 handled the Amiga, Atari ST and CDTV versions, while the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum were developed by Probe Software.

A conversion of the game for the Atari Jaguar was under discussion by German studio Softgold, but work on the port was never stated beyond the discussional phase.

[4] In addition, "Subsong 2" from the Commodore 64 version of Turrican, arranged by Ramiro Vaca, was copied from the song "Escape" of The Transformers: The Movie Soundtrack.

The game was also released for the CDTV, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and PC (MS-DOS).

PC (MS-DOS), Acorn Archimedes and Amiga CD32 versions were also planned and developed, but they were never released and only some enemy sprite designs have surfaced.

All that is available from this game is a piece of preliminary music composed by Chris Huelsbeck and some art assets that were reused in Star Wars: Rebel Strike, such as the Golden Gate-looking bridge.

These versions feature various mods such as the ability to rewind the action to correct mistakes, modify the visuals to better simulate the CRT type displays used by players at the time and input cheat codes.