Nightshade (NES)

Nightshade was developed in six months according to Pauli Kidd. It was last NES game created by Beam and one of the last Konomi games released on their Ultra Games label (which they closed in March that year). Kidd felt that it came to late in the life of the NES to find a real audience. “The timing was exactly wrong,” Kidd says. “The SNES and Genesis came out as we were finishing up the game, and the NES died literally overnight!”. (Cioleyk, 2007)

 

Titled Nightshade: Part 1: The Claws of Sutekh the suggestion was that there may have been more to come in point and click adventure from Nightshade. While there were no further Nightshade games. As Ciolek argues the game did have a critical successor in Shadowrun an action role playing game on the Super Nintendo System. Shadowrun developed by much of the same team at Beam Software shares many features with Nightshade. Its seedy city setting the supports open play exploration. The popularity system returns in some form in Shadowrun where interactions with non player characters have consequences on what the player may access . Shadowrun also has a language system where in their interactions with non player characters you need to develop your vocabulary for interacting further with the city and its inhabitants.

Shadowrun also shares the comedic writing and satirical flair of Nightshade. It has a wry offbeat humour and is not afraid to poke fun at its Nintendo overlords.

Nightshade was developed in six months according to Pauli Kidd. It was last NES game created by Beam and one of the last Konomi games released on their Ultra Games label (which they closed in March that year). Kidd felt that it came to late in the life of the NES to find a real audience. “The timing was exactly wrong,” Kidd says. “The SNES and Genesis came out as we were finishing up the game, and the NES died literally overnight!”. (Cioleyk, 2007)

 

Titled Nightshade: Part 1: The Claws of Sutekh the suggestion was that there may have been more to come in point and click adventure from Nightshade. While there were no further Nightshade games. As Ciolek argues the game did have a critical successor in Shadowrun an action role playing game on the Super Nintendo System. Shadowrun developed by much of the same team at Beam Software shares many features with Nightshade. Its seedy city setting the supports open play exploration. The popularity system returns in some form in Shadowrun where interactions with non player characters have consequences on what the player may access . Shadowrun also has a language system where in their interactions with non player characters you need to develop your vocabulary for interacting further with the city and its inhabitants.

Shadowrun also shares the comedic writing and satirical flair of Nightshade. It has a wry offbeat humour and is not afraid to poke fun at its Nintendo overlords.

 

 

References