Shadow of the Beast began, Martin Edmondson said later, as “a technological demo that sort of morphed into a game”. Having finished Ballistix for Psygnosis, he read the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual and sketched “the points and speeds at which different parallax layers should scroll and where to swap between the two playfields”. The result, released in autumn 1989, had scenery that slid past in more layers than most players had seen on a home computer. CU Amiga’s reviewer counted “no less than 13 layers of parallax, in both the ground and the sky”. Amiga Format called the graphics and sound “a true audio-visual treat”, and then gave the game 78%, because underneath it was “a very old and very uninspired” platform game with one life.
Fast facts
- Developer: Reflections, Martin Edmondson and Paul Howarth, from Gateshead. Period reviews credited both as programmers.
- Publisher: Psygnosis, at £34.99.
- Music: David Whittaker.
- Box art: Roger Dean.
- Size: 350 screens on two disks, according to Psygnosis’s advertising and the reviews.
- Sequels: Shadow of the Beast II (1990) and Shadow of the Beast III (1992).
Reflections
Edmondson told the German magazine Amiga Joker in 1994 that he had written games for the BBC Micro at school with a friend, Nicholas Chamberlain (Ravenskull and Codename: Droid), and with the money set up Reflections with Paul Howarth in 1988. Their first game, Ballistix, came out for both the ST and the Amiga. Beast was, Edmondson said, “our first dedicated Amiga game”. The Games Machine named Edmondson and Howarth as the programmers in its October 1989 review, and Amiga Joker called them both programmers in 1990. Later reference works split the roles, with Howarth as programmer and Edmondson as designer and artist. By 1990 Cormac Batstone had joined Reflections as an artist, and The One introduced him and Edmondson as “the dynamic duo behind Reflections” while they worked on Awesome.
The parallax
The Amiga could show two independent background layers, called playfields, at once. Edmondson used the Copper, the chip that can change colours and scroll positions at chosen lines of the screen, to split each playfield into horizontal bands scrolling at different speeds. Distant hills crept along, nearer ones moved faster, and the grass in front moved fastest of all. Psygnosis advertised “13 levels of parallax scrolling”, and The Games Machine captioned its screenshots with the “13-parallax outdoor scenes”. The parallax scrolling entry explains the technique.
The layers had a cost that Edmondson admitted later. Monsters “could only be moved over one of the two playfields”, which limited what the game could ask of the player: “a deliberate style-over-substance decision”. For Beast II, Reflections wrote a new scrolling system with “fewer colours, less parallax” so that sprites could move freely and the game could hold puzzles.
The music
Edmondson wanted “high-end Fairlight-type sound” rather than the compact, lower-quality sample set composers usually reused, and he and David Whittaker went through “a long negotiation”, re-sampling every instrument for this game. Whittaker said he had “a ton of (by the standards of the time) sample/music memory/disk-space”, and recorded the Korg M1’s pan-flute sounds at 20 kHz, “instead of the usual 8–12, which is why they’re so clear and breathy”. Psygnosis’s advertising claimed “900K of emotive music”. In August 1990 ZZAP!’s readers voted Shadow of the Beast third in their chart of Amiga music.
The game
The player is Aarbron, a human child stolen by the mages of the Beast Lord, Maletoth, and turned into a goat-like warrior-messenger. Watching a sacrifice, he recognises the old man on the altar as his father and turns on his masters. Amiga Format described the rest: mostly horizontal scrolling through 350 screens, above ground and below, fighting with punches and kicks, collecting keys for distant doors, potions that restore energy and extra weapons. The hero starts with 12 energy points and one life. Some traps can only be avoided by walking into them once and remembering where they are.
Edmondson wanted it to feel like an arcade game and to run at the full frame rate. The title screen says only Beast: that was his name for it, he said, but Psygnosis’s legal checks found a clash with an existing game, so the words “Shadow of the” were added and Roger Dean painted a shadow into the box art.
Box, price and reviews
Psygnosis sold Beast in a box twice the normal size, with a Roger Dean cover and a T-shirt carrying more of his art, for £34.99. Amiga Format thought “the asking price of £35 is way over the top, even with a ‘free’ T shirt”. Reflections agreed. “Beast was too expensive,” Edmondson and Howarth told Amiga Joker in 1990, blaming the oversized packaging and the T-shirt, “which wasn’t our idea”.
Reviewers were split in the same way throughout. The Games Machine called it “an amazing program with addictive play”. Amiga Format’s Andy Smith praised “the animation, the sprites, the backgrounds and the parallax scrolling” but found the design five or six years old, with “unavoidable deaths and the tedious end and start of game pauses”. Edmondson later accepted the criticism for the first game. Looking back on why it was remembered, he pointed to its surprise arrival, “the huge box, the Roger Dean artwork and T-shirt”, and that it showed off an Amiga to owners “tired of lazy Atari ST ports”.
Sequels and ports
Shadow of the Beast II (1990) was darker and more of a puzzle game, with music by Tim Wright. Shadow of the Beast III (1992) split the adventure into four themed levels with bosses. According to Edmondson, piracy kept both sequels well short of the original’s sales.
The game was converted to the Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Mega Drive, Master System, PC Engine CD (TurboGrafx-CD), FM Towns and Atari Lynx between 1990 and 1992, most without the Amiga’s hardware tricks. DMA Design’s Commodore 64 version kept the parallax and the music. A Super Nintendo version, Super Shadow of the Beast, was never released. In 2016 Sony published a new Shadow of the Beast for the PlayStation 4, developed by Heavy Spectrum, with the original Amiga game included.
Sources
- ACE issue 25, October 1989: Psygnosis advertisement (“13 levels of parallax scrolling”, “350 screens”, “900K of emotive music”).
- The Games Machine issue 23, October 1989, p. 78: review (Martin Edmondson and Paul Howarth; 13-parallax scenes; 350 screens; the packaging and T-shirt).
- CU Amiga, October 1989, p. 59: review (“no less than 13 layers of parallax”).
- Amiga Format issue 4, November 1989, pp. 42–43: review by Andy Smith, 78% (the story, 350 screens, 12 energy points and one life, the price). The same issue: advertisement for Beast with T-shirt at £34.99.
- The One issue 18, March 1990: Awesome work in progress (Cormac Batstone and Martin Edmondson).
- ZZAP! issue 64, August 1990: readers’ Amiga music chart.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), September 1990: Beast II preview with Edmondson and Howarth (“Beast war zu teuer”).
- The Games Machine (Italy) issue 27, January 1991: Reflections with Cormac Batstone as a new arrival on graphics.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), May 1994: interview with Martin Edmondson (the BBC Micro games; founding Reflections with Paul Howarth in 1988; Ballistix).
- Stuart Hunt, “Beauty of the Beasts”, interview with Martin Edmondson, in The Amiga Book (Imagine Publishing, from Retro Gamer): the technical demo, the parallax sketch and the Copper, the playfields, the frame rate, the title, the music, the sequels, the ports.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Amiga in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2017), pp. 208–210: David Whittaker on the Beast samples.
- Wikipedia, “Shadow of the Beast (1989 video game)” (web, secondary): the programmer and artist credits in later reference works, the list of ports and the 2016 remake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Beast_(1989_video_game)