Shadowgate – The classic adventure game getting reborn from its original makers
I remember Shadowgate quite well even though I don’t think I actually played the game. I mean, I can’t be sure. Back then, renting games was a big part of life for me. I was only seven or eight when Shadowgate was released on NES (it had been out for a couple of years on Mac), although I have a sneaking feeling that I saw it in action somewhere. In any case, for whatever reason, there was this crazy bloody-tailed gargoyle on the cover of the NES version that was instantly etched into my mind. It seems cartoony now but, at the time (and compared to the other games for rent) it seem downright malevolent. I may not remember the game, but I remember looking at the back of the box every time I went into the rental store.
Now, Zojoi wants to bring Shadowgate back to life. I’ll be honest, I fully expected an attempt to bring it back as something that it never was, an action RPG or something like that, when I saw the Kickstarter campaign. Thankfully, and much more excitingly, I appear to have been exactly wrong. Instead, Zojoi is trying to bring back Shadowgate as… a text-based medieval fantasy game with prettier graphics. And that’s awesome. After all, isn’t that what we were promised with crowdfunding? Games that would never exist if they had to get a proper chance? And what is less likely to get a proper place in the market than a turn-based, text heavy adventure game? So, Zojoi – which is the original publisher of Shadowgate - are bringing the game back as a reimagined version, basically a new version of the old game with modern images, bigger and – hopefully – better than before, but it’s still Shadowgate and that’s what makes it interesting to me. Also, the game is quite nice looking already, so that’s a promising thing for some nice pictures to look at on the way to your inevitable demise. If you played the original Shadowgate, I’d love to hear your memories of the original in teh comments. If you want more information about the new Shadowgate, you can mosey over to Kickstarter.
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