Rick Brewster is the developer behind a freeware graphics editor called Paint.NET, however, during his youth, he tried his hand at game development, and The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality was one of the projects he worked on during his pre-teen years.
Brewster thought that The Flute of Immortality had been lost the annals of history, with the only copy of the game on a disk that was sent to his cousin many years ago. You can imagine his surprise then when just before Christmas, Brewster discovered that his game was still alive and kicking when it was featured during a livestream hosted by retro-specialist Macaw. Apparently, Macaw found the game in a collection called the Frostbyte Shareware Collection and decided to share it with his audience, at which point people started to reach out to the game's creator.
As Brewster explained, it was part of a series of fan-made sequels to an old-school text-based adventure called The Golden Flute, which itself was a game that players could experiment with and develop themselves, although it sounds like Brewster went in deep and continued the adventure with his own efforts. Brewster says that he's going to look for the second and third games in the series - they might be on a disk at his parents' house!
Like its predecessors, The Golden Flute IV was made on his Tandy 1000 TL/2, an 8MHz 286 home computer that he bought using money made on his paper round. If you want to see the game for yourself, you can find it here.