Shadow Madness

Shadow Madness is a role-playing video game developed by Craveyard Studios and published by Crave Entertainment for the PlayStation. Set in the world of Arkose, the player takes the role as Stinger, whose town has just been destroyed as a result of a mysterious plague that is spreading quickly across the land. Stinger meets many friends and foes on his way to finding out how the chaos started and how it can be stopped. In traditional RPG fashion, gameplay consists of exploring towns and dungeons, collecting equipment and items, and interacting with non-player characters in environments featuring 3D polygonal models set on 2D pre-rendered backgrounds. Random, turn-based battles take place in fully-3D environments, where the player can execute various attacks and spells against enemies, gain experience points, and increase characters' attributes. Development of Shadow Madness began with ex-Square employees who remained in Redmond, Washington when its North American division moved to Los Angeles. The group, called Big Rain, was led by Ted Woolsey, a translator responsible for localizing Square's prominent Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) RPGs. After announcing Shadow Madness during the summer of 1997, publisher ASCII Entertainment quickly dropped the game. The rights were subsequently purchased by Seattle-based Crave, which absorbed Big Rain and renamed the team Craveyard Studios. The developer put a large emphasis on crafting the game's story for older audiences and chose to develop it on the PlayStation due to the console's ability to display full motion video (FMV) cutscenes. Lobotomy Studios aided development by creating the game's first-person perspective minigames. After numerous delays, Shadow Madness was released in North America in mid-1999 and in Europe in early 2000. The game was met an overall mixed response from critics, who universally compared the game to Square's Final Fantasy VII. Reviewers for Shadow Madness largely panned the graphics and gameplay but made positive comments regarding its plot, script, and musical score. Shadow Madness was a commercial failure, leading to the dissolution of both Craveyard and Lobotomy. A version of the game was released by Piko Interactive and Bleem! for Windows via Steam on February 15, 2022.