Shadow of the Beast
| Shadow of the Beast | |
|---|---|
Cover art by Roger Dean
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| Developer(s) | Reflections Interactive |
| Publisher(s) | Psygnosis |
| Producer(s) | Martin Edmondson |
| Designer(s) | Paul Howarth |
| Programmer(s) | Richard Swinfen |
| Artist(s) | Steven Hammond |
| Composer(s) | David Whittaker |
| Platform(s) | Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Mega Drive, Master System, Atari Lynx, FM-Towns, TurboGrafx-CD |
| Release |
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| Genre(s) | Platform |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Publication | Score |
| Famitsu | 20/40 (MD) 18/40 (TG16) |
| Dragon |  |
| Sega Pro | 90/100 (MS) |
Shadow of the Beast is a platform game developed by Reflections and published by Psygnosis in 1989. The original version was released for the Amiga, and was later ported to many other systems.
Shadow of the Beast was known for its graphics, with numerous colours on screen and up to twelve levels of parallax scrolling backdrops, and for its atmospheric score composed by David Whittaker that used high-quality instrument samples.
Shadow of the Beast was followed by two sequels, Shadow of the Beast II in 1990 and Shadow of the Beast III in 1993, with music penned by Tim Wright under the alias of CoLD SToRAGE. A remake was released for the PlayStation 4 in May 2016, and also included the Amiga original.
A man named Aarbron is kidnapped as a child and corrupted through magic into a monstrous warrior-servant for the evil beast lord Maletoth. The creature's memory of his human life returns when he watches a man being executed, whom he later recognizes as his father. This prompts Aarbron to seek revenge on Maletoth. A long arduous journey ensues, with Aarbron forced to battle his way through both hostile terrain and Maletoth's forces. He eventually confronts one of Maletoth's minions, a gargantuan creature whose only visible body parts are its hand and foot. Defeating the creature, Aarbron is freed from his curse, the titular "Shadow of the Beast", and returned to a more humanoid form.
Shadow of the Beast was designed by Martin Edmondson and Paul Howarth of Reflections Interactive over the course of nine months, and it was their second 16-bit game after their previous game, Ballistix. Edmondson and Howarth described it as their "most ambitious project to date", and stated that they wanted the game to push both the Amiga and Atari ST to their technical limits. To achieve this, the Amiga version was written first, so that they would take advantage of all of the computer's advanced hardware capabilities. The scrolling on the Amiga version ran at 50 frames per second (FPS), the same framerate found in arcade machines, in which they are superior to majority of home computer games at the time with a slower framerate. The developers made use of the hardware sprites and scrolling rather than using the blitter, which they felt that the blitter "does not run quite as fast as some people would believe." To get the speed they wanted, the developers employed difficult techniques such as the sprite multiplexing. The game uses up to twelve levels of parallax scrolling, and up to a maximum of 128 colours on screen.
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