How Shadow of the Beast on PS4 is honouring the Amiga original

Hi there PlayStation fans!

Today, we’re delighted to share with you details of a part of our game that means a great deal to us: heritage. We want to tell you a little bit about the fantastic legacy of Shadow of the Beast and how we’re doing our best to honour it. First of all we’d like to share a video featuring Martin Edmondson and Roger Dean – two of the key creators behind the original game – as they share their thoughts on our modern take:

As fans of the original, we wanted to offer new players to chance to experience first-hand the game that inspired us and offer fellow fans of the original a chance to re-live it. To that end, we’ve included a full emulation of the original Amiga game (we think this might be the first time an Amiga emulation has been published on a Sony console!) as an unlockable bonus in the main game – that means you’ll get the entire original Amiga game alongside the new Shadow of the Beast!

As Martin said in the video, it’s a notoriously difficult game, so we’ve added an infinite lives mode and some other helpful features that should give you a fighting chance (though, these can be disabled for anyone brave enough!).

Music is incredibly important to the atmosphere of Shadow of the Beast. Talented composer Ian Livingstone has produced a fantastic dynamic soundtrack specifically designed to complement our take on Shadow of the Beast’s universe, with each level featuring a unique theme which escalates to match the intensity of the action. In his pursuit of the right sounds to properly define the uniquely alien universe of our Karamoon, Ian investigated and utilized many unique instruments to help realise a truly haunting soundtrack. Fans of the 1989 game's music will notice many elements and themes familiar to them have been subtly woven into the soundtrack for our modern take.

There are even more treats for fans of the original music though as we’ve also included the original David Whittaker score as an unlockable in the game. And seeing many requests for one particular feature made us decide we had to include it: once you’ve earned enough Mana within the game you can unlock the option to play with David’s amazing music as an alternative soundtrack!

If you end up loving the music as much as we do, the complete soundtrack will be available to download as a standalone purchase on the PlayStation Store when the game is released.

The amazing art of Roger Dean will undoubtedly have made a huge impact on anyone who had the famous long-box originals. Roger kindly provided us with a super hi-res scan of the original painting that was used for the box art. Play the game well enough and it can be unlocked to view and zoom in on so you can examine his incredible work in exquisite detail – an incredible chance for fans of the original cover and Roger's work!

As fans ourselves, it's been a lot of fun adding all these little nods to the original game (and even a few other Psygnosis titles!). We hope that anyone else with fond memories of that era will find something to reminisce about, and maybe even newer players will be driven to look up a bit of gaming history!

We have still more to unveil, but if this has fuelled your interest then I’d like to remind you that if you pre-order the game you’ll receive a dynamic theme featuring a creature designed by Roger specifically for our title. This was a dream come true for me to see and I hope it’s exciting for some of you too!