The Greatest Video Game Tech Demo Ever

Shadow of the Beast was a groundbreaking achievement in video games. In 1989 the concept of multi-layer parallax scrolling, and 120+ colors on screen running on a stock Amiga at 7mhz was unheard of. And yet Psygnosis and Reflections made it possible. As a game - Shadow of the Beast was a disappointment, but as a tech demo? It's one of the greatest ever made. In this episode we take a deep dive into the graphics of Shadow of the Beast.

Credits/Sources:

Shadow of the Beast Music - David Whittaker

Timestamps:

00:00 - Early Amiga Games and Bad ST Ports
01:20 - Shadow of the Beast releases in 1989
04:50 - How the graphics worked.
09:37 - Artwork and packaging
11:17 - Ports and Beast Clones
12:44 - Legacy
13:45 - Outro

Social Media Links :

#SOTB #Amiga #Psygnosis

[MarkMcCubbin-wh]

Great video and mostly accurate. I'm the original coder of the Atari ST and worked closely with Psygnosis (and both Paul Howarth and Martin). Happy to add some additional context.

As was mentioned in the video, the Amiga had superior hardware that meant it was indeed quite a challenge to get all the features in. For the Atari ST version:

1. For the underground sections which relied on dual playfield, I had to use a trick to have a 1 bit playfield in the background with 2-bit as the foreground that didn't require expensive blending on the foreground and background. Practically what this meant was for the underground sections, half the colors were lost as it required required the odd and even colors in the palette to be the same. This allowed for an acceptable frame-rate versus the alternative.

2. Originally the scrolling implementation actually leveraged pre-computed scrolling tiles that allowed the use of movem.l (the fastest way to write to the screen), part way through the development it was decided we had to support 512k Atari ST (versus 1M), this sadly meant we could no longer use the fastest way to write to the screen and instead to save memory a combination of movem.l and movep to reduce the memory footprint by almost half.

3. To get all the colors on screen TimerB was used on the ST to emulate the Amiga Copper, in hindsight some of the code was a bit more inefficient that it could have been as it triggered on every scan line to change the colors, at the time, it was necessary.

4. Little known fact, we actually had an STE version that was silky smooth and near identical to the Amiga version, it leveraged the hardware scrolling present and of course the extra memory.

5. For the interstitial screens (when you enter the well and go between other levels), we use other tricks to flip the screen part way down to high-res to get the font to be silky smooth and keep the images with full-palette.

6. Dave Whittaker also did the music for the ST version, used Quartet for the player which absolutely ate into the CPU.

Psygnosis were an absolutely fantastic publisher and really wanted to take advantage of the STE and 1M models, alas, the market was deemed too small to make it worth it.

Little known fact, Flimbos Quest, from System 3 was also using the same tech.

[smakfu]

My experience with Shadow of the Beast wasn't playing it (though I did play it), it was disassembling the game and trying to figure out how the copper lists were written. As I slowly pieced together what they'd done with playfields, sprite reuse, palette swaps, I remember being astonished at how insanely inventive the programming was. They did things in 89 that nobody in the preceding 4 years had thought of - these weren't simple copper bars, this was taking the copper's three instructions into a level of conditional display manipulation that was on a whole different scale. Because, like a modern GPU, the copper was its own state machine with its own execution state and independent ability to interact with chip RAM and devices, it could truly operate in parallel programmed fashion with the CPU. This was way ahead of its time, even if very primitive in implementation. Once you realized what was going on with Shadow of the Beast and its use of the copper, you never looked at programming (or any of the other computers from that era) quite the same way.

[youuuuuuuuuuutube]

What's crazy is that the programmer just read the Amiga technical manual and after reading it, he knew exactly how to combine everything to create something that looks amazing and that runs at 50fps. And then he did it!

[dribblesbarbax]

Shadow of the Beast II is what sold me on the Amiga. Seeing that opening cinematic for the first time. Chills.

[Mamiya]

Whoever drew up that original puggsy owl logotype? They deserve some award. Legendary item.

[lieutenantkoerschgen]

„As the mist clears, the eerie image of a forest forms in front of you. To the east, a vast plain extends toward the horizon. Westwards however, in the thick of the forest, a thousand pairs of eyes pierce the mist, glaring despondently back at you“

Etched in my memory forever.

[valuemastery]

So true. I was a games programmer back in these days, working for Imagitec Ltd., we programmed games for Gremlin Graphics. We did the same game for Atari ST and Amiga, so I developed a transfer system, where we could do all development and compiling on the ST (mainly because of the great and super-sharp SM124 display), and then automatically packaged the software in Amiga binary format and transferred over to the Amiga to test. Code was 95% shared between both platforms; however, for time critical graphics I did use the Amiga custom chips via conditional compiling/assembly.

[SomeOrangeCat]

Beautiful graphics. FANTASTIC music...plays like shit.

[zanfear]

The remake on PS4 was a LOT of fun. I especially loved playing with the original soundtrack once you unlocked it. It's a shame they didn't remake the sequels.

[pagb]

This game's art scared the shit out of me... but didn't stop me from playing it

[ultimateman]

I didn't know the history of SotB and mostly knew it from the Genesis port, a game that looked nice but played crummy. I had heard it was originally on the Amiga but you really put things into perspective well in this video. Seeing it in 1989 on the Amiga surely would have been something special.

My personal introduction to Psygnosis was Wipeout on the PS1, which was a demo on the PS1 launch disc and a game I was lucky enough to get for Christmas in 1995. Suffice to say that Wipeout was otherworldly in 1995 and the unreal graphics and smooth frame rate combined with the epic soundtrack absolutely blew me away. Still one of my favorites on the PS1.

[norwegianberserkerbear]

These are great memories! When you went over to a friends house and he bought (or copied!) a new game. When you went to the local computer store and saw the new big games displayed. When I loaded in The Last Ninja on the Commodore 64. When I saw Shadow of the Beast the first time on the Amiga. And Monkey Island. Decades later these memories are still clear. Defining moments in our lives. And of course the demo scene, with kids making incredible music and graphics for fun. These were the best of times!

[ncf]

perfect title. Every time I 'play' it - practically never - I think to myself this is the greatest demo ever, and it sure as hell had me buying an Amiga to play it. They should do what they did with Speedball 2, produce an updated game that is much more playable, ie. easy. Because its a shame we cant all go through SOTB without cheats, or even the desire to play through it.

[JoshuaJaeger]

Thank you for sharing this! I first found out about "BEAST" was when a friend at school came in with a "Beast" T-Shirt that he got when he ordered a special edition on hi Amiga. I loved video games, but had no experience with Amiga and was forever curious! My first time experiencing the game in my home was with the Turbografx-Super CD version which is also really gorgeous! A nice tech demo for Turbo as well, as the Turbo had difficulty pulling off multi-layer parallax!

[danboid]

SOTB was one of the first games I got to play on an Amiga 500 and it blew me away, coming from mainly playing on C64s, Speccys and Ataris at home. This video does a great job of explaining how and why it was so impressive but you really had to be there at the time to truly understand how impressive this game was as a home video game.

I wish I could remember the exact details but there was a tale I heard about Martin Edmondson, whilst developing SOTB, modifying a floppy disk and drive, adding a bit of paper or something to the platter of the floppy so he could hear how fast the disk was spinning, trying to optimize the floppy reads.

You didn't mention that Wrath of the Demon is IMO much more impressive on the C64 than it is on the Amiga, taking the C64s reduced spec into consideration. One of the most technically impressive C64 games ever I'd say.

SOTB for the PS4 was he game that I jailbroke my PS4 to play and it was my first venture into the PS4 scene. I actually prefer the PS3 because its more homebrew friendly but I'm getting OT now.

[chrisdigiuseppe]

I was at GDC a few years ago wearing my OG Shadow of the Beast t-shirt that came in the long box. This dude ran across the street asking 'holy shit is that the Shadow of the Beast shirt??' And gave me a big hug. Super cool memory

[shmehfleh]

It really can't be overstated just how impressive the Amiga was in its heyday, and how fast the technology was changing back then. In 1985, you could easily have come from an Atari 2600 straight to something like an A1000 and think you'd traveled forward in time. Even if you kept up with the state of the art, went from an Atari to an Intellivision, to an NES and then to an Amiga, you would've likely been floored at what it could do, even in its early days. But the tech kept getting better and better, and by the early 90s, games like this were commonplace on hardware that cost a fraction of the Amiga. It was a wild ride back then.

[Hainbach]

Way before I got an Amiga, I bought game mags like AMS and Power Play to gawk at the screenshots. Beats seemed out of this world.

[chozolin]

Regarding technical feats, I remember being amazed by the sound of my PC speaker when playing "Out of this world". I did not have a soundcard at that moment, but that game could output actual music and FX through my PC speaker! While other games just mainly beeps and other pretty basic sounds. Since then, I have been wondering why it was the only game of my library capable of that.
I would sincerely love an episode about this, because it had me wondering about it, since.
Thumbs up MVG!

[eljusticiero]

Agree. I was there this was a blast. The atmosphere....