In the early 1990s, Nintendo didn’t allow sex, drugs and alcohol to appear on its consoles. Games also couldn’t show blood or graphic violence. This presented a challenge for Australian developers Beam Software, who were turning the gritty pen-and-paper roleplaying game Shadowrun into a future classic.
So while the protagonist Jake can only order a ‘warm glass of milk’ in a sleazy ‘club’ (‘bars’ weren’t allowed), Beam still managed to deliver a dark neo-noir story true to the original RPG’s seedy cyberpunk world. That world was realised through Beam’s technical innovations, including character masking, an isometric view and a keyword dialogue system previously only seen on PCs.
But it was lead designer Pauli Kidd’s wry and atmospheric writing that ensured the beloved tabletop RPG became one of the most critically acclaimed games of the 1990s.
Curator Notes
Shadowrun (1993) for the NES is based on the tabletop role-playing game of the same name. The pen and paper originally published in 1989 game drew on the cybernetic future imagined in the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson and mashed them with the fantasy world of monsters and magic popularised by role playing game Dungeons and Dragons.
Gibson himself was not a fan of the concept, jocularly stating: “[W]hen I see things like Shadowrun, the only negative thing I feel about it is that initial extreme revulsion at seeing my literary DNA mixed with elves.”
No one in the 1990s had graduated from university with a degree in videogames design. One pathway to game design was a passion for tabletop role-playing games. These people had honed their design skills playing, making modules and creating original tabletop role-playing games. Beam Software’s Shadowrun designer Pauli Kidd was one such talent. By the time she took on the role of creating Shadowrun, Kidd had already published two well received tabletop RPGS. Albedo: the role-playing game (1988) based on the comics of Steve Gallachi, and Shadow and Steel (1989), a fantasy swashbuckling game set in a reimagined 17th-century Europe. In Shadow and Steel, courtly skills were rewarded as highly as combat prowess; the game included carefully designed systems and statistics to support chivalry as well as combat. At Beam, Kidd applied her deep understanding of tabletop RPGs in her role as writer and designer on the Shadowrun for the SNES.
It’s immediately striking how the statistical combat component of the tabletop game translates to the screen, seamlessly managing all those fiddly combat tables for magic, weapons, armour and cyberware.
But Shadowrun also brings the rich world of the original tabletop game to the SNES with plenty of humour. Despite Nintendo’s child-friendly content restrictions, it maintains a bit of a darker edge. Kidd has given protagonist & shadowrunner Jake Armitage plenty of droll lines and amusing encounters, leaning into comedic writing as a pleasure of roleplaying.
Dr Helen Stuckey | Play it Again Project
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Not in ACMI's collection
Previously on display
15 June 2023
ACMI: Gallery 1
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ACMI Identifier
188461
Curatorial section
The Story of the Moving Image → Games Lab → GL-03. Cluster 3 → GL-03-C06
Object Types
Computer game/Game