“Beyond have taken the traditional text adventure, smashed it to pieces, thrown it on the scrapheap and put something radically different in its place.” That was how Sinclair Programs opened its review of Shadowfire in July 1985. The game was an adventure with no text parser at all. The player commands a team of six on board an enemy starship, in real time, by pointing a cursor at small pictures. Sinclair User called it “the first ever on the Spectrum” of its kind, CRASH gave it 96%, and CRASH’s readers voted it into first place in both of the magazine’s charts in the same month.
Fast facts
- Developer: Denton Designs. Publisher: Beyond. £9.95, 48K Spectrum, machine code; also released for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC.
- Team: six characters, Zark Montor, Syylk, Sevrina Maris, Torik, Maul and Manto.
- Time limit: 100 minutes of real time.
- CRASH: 96%, issue 17, June 1985.
- Sequel: Enigma Force (1986), also by Denton Designs.
Six against General Zoff
CRASH’s review told the story. Shadowfire is a new kind of starship, and its plans are on a microdisc embedded in the spine of Ambassador Kryxix. The traitor General Zoff has captured Kryxix and holds him on his own ship, the Zoff V, and his interrogators will find the plans in 100 minutes. The player controls Enigma, “a mix of heroes, criminal scum and cybernetic engineering”, whose task is to board the ship, rescue Kryxix, capture Zoff and take or destroy the Zoff V.
Each member of the team does something the others cannot. Zark Montor is the human leader. Syylk is an insectoid fighter with a hatred of Zoff. Sevrina Maris is a human with a criminal record who picks locks, and “tends to be loyal only to herself”. Torik is a bird-like gun runner, good with explosives and the fastest mover, so he makes a good scout, though he is vulnerable to attack. Maul is a slow, well-protected weapons droid, and Manto a transport droid that can barely defend itself.
Playing with pictures
Everything happens on a handful of screens. The Team screen shows all six characters; the Status screen shows one character’s agility, strength, stamina and the weight they are carrying as green bars; the Objects screen picks things up, drops them and uses them; the Movement screen shows arrows for the eight directions, filled in where a way is open; and the Battle screen shows friend and foe in the same location, with icons to advance, stand fast or retreat. A map of the ship and the status of the whole team stay at the top. CRASH noted that the whole game “may be joystick driven”: move the cursor to an action icon such as “pick up”, press fire, then move to the object.
Sinclair Programs worried at first. “Using no text in the game has meant that the instruction manual is difficult to follow, especially without the game in front of you”, and there were “as many as thirty images on screen at one time”. Once it had played, it changed its mind: “The initial panic caused by complicated instructions is quite unjustified, for the icons are, in practice, far more easy to use than the restricted and specialist vocabulary required by most adventures. If you are stuck in Shadowfire it is because you are not thinking on your feet, not because the program’s vocabulary is inadequate for your needs.” It gave the game 95%.
Sinclair User gave it five stars, with one complaint: the pictures were clear and colourful, but small, and the ship’s map was “almost lost” among the control boxes.
How it was received
The June 1985 CRASH review opened by saying that the line between adventure and arcade games “has definitely taken a battering recently, and Shadowfire is going to worsen the situation”. One reviewer found it “a very difficult game to describe or put into any category”. Another admitted the icons “seem a bit daunting but after some practice they are really simple to use”.
| Magazine | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| CRASH | 96% | issue 17, June 1985 |
| Sinclair User | 5 stars | issue 39, June 1985 |
| Sinclair Programs | 95% | July 1985 |
| ACE | 890 | issue 3, December 1987 |
CRASH’s review of 1985 called it “the first fully icon-driven graphics adventure”. Two years later, looking back at the June 1985 issue, the magazine was more careful. Pete Cooke’s Ski Star 2000 “may have been the first game to use icons, but Shadowfire was the first to base the entire gameplay and control on these graphic devices.” It was also less generous: “Looking back, Shadowfire actually lacked content, but its shallow qualities were well disguised by the novel icon presentation.” Robin Candy, it recalled, had completed the game on the second day after it arrived. In December 1987 ACE‘s strategy buyers’ guide still described it as one of the first icon-driven strategy games and one of the best.
In the charts
CRASH‘s Hotline and Adventure charts were both compiled from readers’ votes, not sales (see Reading the charts). In August 1985 Shadowfire went straight in at number 1 in both. The next month it was at 4 in the Hotline and 2 in the Adventure chart. It returned to number 1 in the Hotline in October 1985 and was at 6 in November. It stayed in the Adventure chart much longer: it was still there, at 15, in December 1987.
The sequel
In June 1985 CRASH reported that Denton Designs were already working on a sequel for Beyond, in which the Enigma team’s ship crashes on Syylk’s home planet. It was released as Enigma Force, which CRASH reviewed in March 1986 as “the long awaited sequel to Beyond’s famous Shadowfire” and gave 88%.
Denton Designs had been set up in Liverpool by former staff of Imagine Software. CRASH later described Shadowfire as “the game Denton Designs first contracted for”, although Gift from the Gods for Ocean was released first. The studio went on to write The Great Escape for Ocean.
Sources
- CRASH, issue 17, June 1985, pp. 16–18: Shadowfire review (Beyond, 48K, £9.95, machine code, author Denton Designs). The review index in issue 24 gives 96%.
- CRASH, issue 17, June 1985: news of the sequel (“Shadowfire 2”).
- Sinclair User, issue 39, June 1985: Spectrum Software Scene review (five stars).
- Sinclair Programs, July 1985: Soft Focus review (Beyond, £9.95, 95%).
- CRASH, issue 19, August 1985, pp. 70–71: Hotline Top 30 and Adventure Top 30. Issue 20, September 1985, pp. 70–71; issue 21, October 1985, p. 99; issue 22, November 1985, p. 112; issue 47, December 1987, p. 113.
- CRASH, issue 24, January 1986, p. 73: review of 1985 (“the first fully icon-driven graphics adventure”); “The Official 1985 Index”.
- CRASH, issue 26, March 1986, pp. 128–129: Enigma Force review (Beyond, £9.95, Denton Designs, 88%).
- CRASH, issue 46, November 1987, p. 80: retrospective of issue 17 (Ski Star 2000, Denton Designs, Robin Candy).
- ACE, issue 3, December 1987: strategy buyers’ guide (Shadowfire, ACE rating 890).