Shadowfire
The first game with no words
Denton Designs' 1985 squad game for Beyond replaced the text parser with icons — CRASH called it the first fully icon-driven game — and went to number one twice.
Written by Denton Designs for Beyond: a real-time squad rescue in which you command five characters aboard an enemy ship — and give every order through icons, with no typing at all.
Fast facts
- Developer: Denton Designs. Publisher: Beyond.
- CRASH describes it as “Shadowfire, the first fully icon[-driven]” game.
- Sequel: Enigma Force, also icon-driven.
Chart performance
CRASH charts, 7 appearances:
| Date | Position | Chart |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 1985 | #1 | Hotline Top 30 |
| Oct 1985 | #1 | Hotline Top 30 |
| Nov 1985 | #6 | Hotline Top 30 |
| Dec 1985 | #10 | Hotline Top 30 |
| Nov 1986 | #17 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Dec 1986 | #16 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Feb 1987 | #19 | Adventure Top 30 |
Number one twice in the general chart, then the same migration into the Adventure chart that Lords of Midnight and Fairlight undergo — and, like them, a long quiet tail there instead of a disappearance.
How it was received
The press agreed with each other to an unusual degree.
| Magazine | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| Personal Computer News | 10/10 | April 1985 |
| CRASH | 96% | June 1985 |
| Sinclair Programs | 95% | July 1985 |
| Sinclair User | 5/5 | June 1985 |
| ZX Computing | 5/5 | August 1985 |
| Your Computer | 4/5 | May 1985 |
CRASH’s review carries the details the box did not: Beyond, £9.95, 48K, machine code, Denton Designs credited by name. The plans for the Shadowfire starship are embedded in the spine of Ambassador Kryxix, held aboard General Zoff’s ship — and you have 100 minutes before Zoff’s interrogators extract them. The reviewer’s framing is that the adventure/arcade distinction had been taking a battering, and that this game would make it worse.
ACE scored it 890/1000 in a December 1987 retrospective, two and a half years on.
Getting rid of the parser
In 1985 a game with depth meant a game you typed at, and typing at a game meant guessing which verb the author had implemented. “GET LAMP” works; “PICK UP LAMP” does not; the player is playing the parser, not the world.
Shadowfire removes the problem by removing the words. Every action is an icon, every target is selected, and nothing can be phrased wrongly. What you lose is expressive range; what you gain is that the interface stops being an obstacle and the game can run in real time, which a typed game cannot, because typing is slow.
That combination — real time, no text, a squad with individual skills, and a clock counting down — is why it stands out from everything around it, and why Beyond could sell a strategy game to the general chart instead of the adventure one.
What removing the words cost
Sinclair Programs reviewed it and found the trade-off precisely, which no other review in this Vault does.
Its opening is the strongest statement of the design anyone made at the time:
Beyond have taken the traditional text adventure, smashed it to pieces, thrown it on the scrapheap and put something radically different in its place. Shadowfire is a completely text free adventure, allowing quicker decisions, faster movement and more action than ever before.
Then the complaint, and it is not the one you would predict:
First impression of Shadowfire is of a complex, unapproachable game. Using no text in the game has meant that the instruction manual is difficult to follow, especially without the game in front of you.
The difficulty did not disappear when the parser did. It moved into the documentation. A verb-noun game can be explained in a sentence because the reader already speaks the language; a game of thirty on-screen icons has to teach its own vocabulary before anything else can happen, and a printed manual is a poor place to do that.
The reviewer’s conclusion is the part worth keeping, because it vindicates the design and indicts the manual in the same breath: the “initial panic caused by complicated instructions is quite unjustified, for the icons are, in practice, far more easy to use” than the alternative.
The same review confirms the clock independently of CRASH — “you have only an hour and forty minutes” — and records that as many as thirty images can be on screen at once.
Denton Designs
Denton were ex-Imagine people who set up in Liverpool after that company’s collapse, and they appear in the CRASH reader ranking of Ocean and Imagine talent as a programming house in their own right, credited with The Great Escape and Where Time Stood Still.
An icon interface, a real-time squad and two of the era’s best-regarded Spectrum games is a strong body of work for a studio formed out of a bankruptcy.