Shadow of the Beast

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Shadow of the Beast
System(s): Super CD-ROM²
Publisher: Psygnosis, Victor Musical Industries (JP)
Developer: Reflections Interactive, DMA Design
Distributor: Turbo Technologies, Inc. (US)
Genre: Action
Number of players: 1
Release Date RRP Code JP 1992-03-27 JCCD2008 US 1992 TGXCD1018
Non-NEC versions Amiga Amstrad CPC Atari ST Commodore 64 FM Towns Lynx Master System Mega Drive ZX Spectrum

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Shadow of the Beast, known as Shadow of the Beast: Mashou no Okite (シャドー･オブ･ザ･ビースト 魔性の掟) in Japan, is an action game developed by Reflections Interactive for the Commodore Amiga and published by Psygnosis. It was brought to a variety of systems, including Super CD-ROM² hardware in 1992. It was followed by Shadow of the Beast II and Shadow of the Beast III, neither of which were released on a NEC system.

Story

The player controls the Beast Messenger. Born a human child and kidnapped at a young age by mages who serve the Beast Lord, the Beast Messenger was transformed into a monster and had all his memories wiped to enter a lifetime of servitude. However, suddenly, all his memories return to him, and he now seeks revenge and to escape.

History

Development

The Super CD-ROM² version of Shadow of the Beast was developed by DMA Design, alongside a separate version for the Commodore 64. In June 1990, during development of projects such as Lemmings and Cutiepoo, Psygnosis had sent programmer Dave Jones a contract for a PC Engine version of Shadow of the Beast. Dave was in love with the console at the time and so wanted to leap at the chance to program the game himself, however fellow programmer Mike Dailly protested that he should be allowed to do it as the PC Engine's CPU was his speciality. Once the hardware had arrived, Dave by then allowed Mike to program the game while he continued development of Lemmings.

Mike started programming the basic framework on July 23, which took him one week, allowing proper development of the project to begin on July 30. This grew to become his most hated project as he grew increasingly frustrated with the official software development kit to the point of writing his own SDK with Brian Watson helping out with some code he had used in DMA Debug, spending many late nights over the span of a few weeks taking apart the official SDK for reference. While this custom SDK was used for main development, map editing was still handled using NEC's official graphical tools.

Magazine articles

Main article: Shadow of the Beast/Magazine articles.

Physical scans

Super CD-ROM², JP
Cover
Spinecard Disc

Super CD-ROM², US
Cover
Disc

Technical information

ROM dump status

System	Hash	Size	Build Date	Source	Comments
?	CRC32 MD5 SHA-1			CD-ROM (JP)
?	CRC32 MD5 SHA-1			CD-ROM (US)

References

Sega Retro has more information related to Shadow of the Beast