BEAUTY OF THE BEASTS

The original Shadow Of The Beast is famous for many things: impressive visuals, great use of parallax scrolling, David Whittaker’s fantastic score and being harder to finish than a glass of vinegar are just a few that we can think of. We can further list its lavish packaging and wallet-emptying price tag. Stuart Hunt speaks to Reflections’ boss Martin Edmondson and discovers the story behind the studio’s polarising Beast trilogy

Shadow Of The Beast Having finished the Amiga game Ballistix, a budget Crossfire-style game for Psygnosis that shares the same fantasy aesthetics as the Shadow series, Reflections co-founder Martin Edmondson began reading Addison-Wesley’s Amiga Hardware Reference Manual and, becoming interested in parallax scrolling techniques, found a cornerstone for the studio’s next game. “I did a technical sketch laying out the points and speeds at which different parallax layers should scroll and where to swap between the two playfields to produce a deep parallax effect,“ he recalls. ”For its time the Amiga’s co-processor (the ‘copper’) was an amazingly powerful bit of hardware that allowed you to precisely control all sorts of things at raster line level, including colour changes and hardware scrolling rates.” Martin was impressed by the power of the…

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The Amiga Book (Digital) - 1 Issue, The Amiga Book 3rd Edition

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