Shadow, The

The Shadow is an unreleased game by Ocean, which was based on the 1994 movie of the same name. By: Evan G

The Shadow was a movie that came out in 1994, based on the popular pulp fiction character from the 1930s. The revival of The Shadow was supposed to spawn a major franchise, but the relative failure of the movie meant that this never materialized. The game was obviously part of that plan. However, the game was only in the early stages of development when the movie actually came out, and many delays meant that the release would have been nearly a year after the movie. That might have been all right if the movie was successful, and the game was good, but it didn't work out that way. The game got pretty mediocre scores when reviewed.

I played the game for an hour, and it is every bit as mediocre as the reviews state. The music is pretty good, but there is only a limited amount of moves, and there are only about 10 types of enemies in the game. Beat-em-ups are not my favourite genre to begin with, but there are definitely better games to choose. The game is by no means horrible, it is just boring. The main gimmick is that The Shadow will pull out his guns whenever the enemies also have guns. This is really poorly implemented, since you can only hit the enemies when they have a target on them, and it is not clear how to consistently get it to work.

Early video phone?	Level intro

Throwing dudes	Shooting Spencer, who has a firepower advantage. Foreground objects are a constant annoyance in this game.

No match for the pipe	Elevator beat-down

Jump kicks	Slicing the Mongols

The shooting gimmick doesn't work very well	The all-American baseball bat is a much better weapon

The boxing dude is pretty tough, until I figured out you can just jump kick him repeatedly in the corner	The graphics in the name entry screen are actually very nice.

Box from Half.com, Serial Code: SNS-ATOE-USA

Leaked prototype

The leaked prototype was a scene release by the group "Fuck" (?). The date stamps on the files are from late February and early March 1995. This is probably close to the final version of the game. Another dump is floating around that is purported to be closer final, but after playing it, it is clear that it is a corrupted version of the scene release, with the header hacked to give it the appearance of being complete. While playing it, some of the enemies glitched out, which is a result of this corruption. The scene release is the cleanest version of this game, and there is no reason to believe it is hacked.

     ______________/\__________________/\___
eNf__\  ______/   /    /        /     /    /
   /    ____/    /    /    /___/_       __/
  //     / /.   /    //   /     /.  /    \_
_/______/  \________/\_________/___/\_____/_
-*----------------------------------------*-
           The Shadow from Ocean!
-*-( Snes/Smc/16Mbit )--------------------*-

Magazine coverage

Some early coverage of the game was in the August 1994 issue of Gamepro. The preview states that it would be out in September 1994, which would have been relatively close to when the movie came out (which was July 1, 1994).

Preview in the August 1994 issue of Gamepro

EGM gave the game a four page preview in the December 1994 issue. At this point, they said the preview version was only 20% complete. It also said it would be out in December 1994, but that obviously didn't happen.

Info box from the preview in the December 1994 issue of EGM

Nintendo Power gave a fairly generous preview of the game in the December 1994 issue. They took a bit of a swipe at the movie in the process.

Preview in the December 1994 issue of Nintendo power

Reviews of the game started coming out in late 1994. Most complain that the gameplay is pretty generic, though they praised the music. The Nintendo Power review came out in the May 1995 issue, although in the review it states it was supposed to be out in February 1995. It must have really been cancelled at the last minute.

Review in the January 1995 issue of Gamepro

Review in the January 1995 issue of EGM

Review in the May 1995 issue of Nintendo Power

I did a stream of this game on Twitch, you can watch that below.

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