The beast that sold on looks

Shadow of the Beast was made by Martin Edmondson and Paul Howarth, of Reflections, a Newcastle duo who had dropped out of their computing course to make games, and was published by Psygnosis in 1989 for the Amiga ^[1][2]. It took nine months and was the pair's second 16-bit game, after Ballistix ^[1].

They wanted to push the Amiga to its limits, and so they wrote the Amiga version first. Instead of the Blitter, they chose hardware sprites and scrolling, and multiplexed the sprites to get more on screen ^[1]. The result was up to twelve layers of parallax and up to 128 colours at once ^[1]. The music, by David Whittaker, used instruments created on a Korg M1 synthesiser and sampled at 20 kHz ^[1].

Apart from how many colours and layers of parallax and monsters we could squeeze on screen, no thought went into it whatsoever.

The packaging was part of the show. Psygnosis, founded in Liverpool in 1984 by Ian Hetherington, Jonathan Ellis and David Lawson after the collapse of Imagine Software, had an unmistakable image: black boxes, with a red frame and fantasy illustrations by Roger Dean ^[3]. Beast got a Dean cover, cost £35 and had a T-shirt in the box ^[1][2].

The graphics left everyone open-mouthed; the gameplay, less so. In 1992, The One magazine summed it up like this: technically it was unbeatable, with sprites bigger than anything seen before and mouth-watering scenery, but, according to the critics, something was missing: "although it looked good enough to eat, there just wasn't enough gameplay" ^[2].

The authors were the first to agree. While preparing the third game, Edmondson told The One: "It was definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time. Apart from how many colours and layers of parallax and monsters we could squeeze on screen, no thought went into it whatsoever" ^[2]. He called it "a graphics showcase", admitted that the code of the first Beast "was so bad" that it could have been done ten times better and added that, in 1992, you could no longer make a game in five months without an idea as addictive as Lemmings ^[2].

Beast was ported to nine other systems, from the Atari ST to the Mega Drive and the Lynx, and even to the ZX Spectrum, by Gremlin; the Commodore 64 and PC Engine versions were made by DMA Design, of Dundee, the same studio as Lemmings ^[1]. It had two sequels, in 1990 and 1992, and a remake for the PlayStation 4 in 2016, after Sony had bought Psygnosis, in 1993 ^[1][3].