Though they released little more than twenty games in the two decades of their existence (nearly all of them in the first decade), Silmarils is probably the French company that is best known and best documented outside France. Just an example: by 2004, the listing of Silmarils games on MobyGames was more or less complete. Yet two years later, there were still only about twenty of the more than 150 Loriciels games in the database.
There are several reasons for this. Founded at a time when the 8-bit market was already in decline, Silmarils rarely bothered with the 8-bit platforms that tended to be country specific, and instead concentrated on the far more international 16-bit platforms—Amiga, Atari ST, IBM PC—from the beginning. Their games were multi-language and usually released parallely in Europe and the US. And last not least they spent more effort on the PC conversions of their games than most other French companies did at the time.
Targhan is a good example for this. In the same year, Quest for the Timebird still had CGA and terrible speaker music, and Emmanuelle had EGA and no mouse support (which in this case was fatal). Targhan has Soundblaster sound and VGA graphics, 16 color only and thus a bit simpler than on the Amiga, but still as good as on the Atari ST. In most later Silmarils games, like Metal Mutant, graphics would be the same on all platforms.
Another interesting aspect is that Targhan anticipated a graphic style that would become the fashion only in the years to come. When I set up the page for Quake II, I was struck by the similarities between the two games. The same red and brown, the same crimson sky, the same brooding, threatening atmosphere. You find a similar atmosphere in Doom and Hexen, but I can't remember having it seen in a game before Targhan. Compare instead the landscape in Ishar, a game otherwise far closer to Targhan, and you will see how enormous the difference is.
