Grasshopper Manufacture has announced an unexpected revival – Shadows of the Damned: Remastered.
As we noted only the other day, Grasshopper Manufacture’s 25th anniversary website has a counter on it. “Something’s gonna happen,” the Japanese developer teases.
Shortly before Summer Game Fest, however, the studio announced Shadows of the Damned: Remastered – logically enough, a redo of the studio’s own 2011 action title.
The trailer accompanying the announcement shows little of the remaster itself; instead, it takes the form of a curious skit where Shadows of the Damned's protagonist Garcia Hotspur materialises in the real world and shoots Grasshopper’s community manager in the head. You can see it for yourself below.
That’s a nice Atari Star Wars arcade cabinet right there.
For the uninitiated, Shadows of the Damned was a superhero game dev team up of sorts, being a collaboration between Grasshopper founder Suda51 and Resident Evil designer Shinji Mikami. A grungy third-person shooter/brawler featuring the aforementioned Garcia, a demon hunter, and Johnson, a supernatural sidekick capable of shapeshifting into a motorcycle or a range of guns.
Shadows of the Damned was published by EA, which held quite a lot of creative sway over development; the game went through multiple iterations and rewrites, and Mikami later described the process as “disappointing.”
Nevertheless, Shadows of the Damned remains a cult favourite, and it’ll be intriguing to see whether Grasshopper have used the remaster as an opportunity to fix elements they weren’t happy with on its original release.
There’s another burning question, though: is Shadowed of the Damned the game Grasshopper has been teasing on its website revealed early, or is there something else it’s planning to announce? At the time of writing, the same countdown and “Something’s gonna happen” tease still remains.
In the trailer above, there’s talk of a Grasshopper Direct, scheduled for 1pm on 14 June (Japanese Standard Time), which is 5am on the 15 June in the UK.
As the trailer itself says, “Stay tuned”.
