Software • Lost Amiga Game: Prophecy of the Shadow

In the midst of playing a D&D Gold Box game by SSI, last night I ran across this interesting advertisement for Prophecy of the Shadow on the inside jacket of one of the manuals.


The advertisement describes the game like this:

PROPHECY OF THE SHADOW... is SSI's exciting single-character role-playing game that uses state-of-the-art technology to breathe life into a mystical fantasy.

• Stunning cinematics with over fifty digitized art and animation sequences, including characters in full costume.
• Simple point-and-click interface with icon-based commands and graphical inventories makes the game fast and easy to play. Learn words and converse from an icon bar by simply clicking on the word.
• Over 50 sound effects and a continuous FM soundtrack enhance the action.
• Three perspective viewpoints: An adventure view allows you to explore this exciting world and engage in combat; an up-close-and-personal mode lets you converse with Non-Player Characters; and through
  the use of magic, an eagle's view of the world.
• A large, complex world - both above and below ground - that you must save!

At a high level, it kind of looks and sounds a bit like Faery Tale Adventure or the Ultima games, except with full-motion animated cut-scenes! I'm thinking, "From SSI? This sounds super cool. How've I never heard of this?" When I hear Amiga and cut-scenes in the same breath, my mind usually wanders to Wing Commander. Sign me up!

And it's being marketed to Amigans with a pre-order push.


Naturally I run to Google and search it up. Wikipedia only mentions MS-DOS as a platform... I hunt a bit more.

According to CRPG Addict, an Amiga port had made it pretty far but died before getting to the finish line:

but the team had problems working out several bugs, and just about then, the Amiga market began to collapse. Rather than finish the port, they turned their attention to the sequel--which would have brought the son of the original protagonist to a larger continent--but unfortunately never finished that, either.

What a damn shame. I would love to play this game on Amiga hardware. It sounds like a fun twist from SSI standards while most people seem to have never been made aware of its existence.

CRPG Addict:

A sole character, presented throughout the game from an axonometric view, is thrust into the world when his mentor is assassinated as part of a political purge of mages. As he grows in power and skill, he learns of a prophecy that foretells the return of an ancient enemy named Abraxus. In his quest to counter the prophecy, he kills an evil regent and restores a princess to her rightful throne. The world is small and easy to explore. RPG elements--including combat, inventory, and character development--are simplistic but effective for the scope of the game. Graphics are mediocre in quality but are thoughtfully drawn to create interesting scenes and scenarios.

...

A lot of contemporary reviews suggested that Prophecy was a new direction for SSI, that we'd be seeing a lot more single-character role-playing adventures from the publisher in the coming years. Scanning ahead, I can't quite tell if this forecast comes true. SSI certainly offered a diverse variety of RPGs in its prolific 1992-1996 period, including the last of the Gold Box titles, the third Eye of the Beholder, new Dungeons and Dragon series based on the Spelljammer, Ravenloft, and Dark Sun settings, and a handful of one-off titles generally developed by other companies. But judging from screenshots and summaries, it's hard to find any that feature quite the same simplicity as Prophecy or that even make use of a similar engine.

Regarding Prophecy's full-motion video...er, photographic stills, the designer of the game Jaimi R. R. McEntire admitted:

We were really making it all up as we went along. The actors were captured with a video camera straight to the computer via a targa board - hideously expensive at the time. We really had no idea what we were doing.

I like to hope it would have played beautifully on Amiga hardware had this game been published in the 1990-1991 timeframe (or earlier!). Reducing it to 32 colors might have been an improvement. I wonder if anyone ever held onto any of the Amiga port's code? Considering the advancements in today's Amiga dev scene, it seems a shame to have gotten so far and abandoned even though I'm sure the financial decisions made by SSI at the time were entirely sound.

Statistics: Posted by intric8 — Sun Mar 17, 2024 10:32 am — Replies 0 — Views 216

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