Shadowrun is a Tabletop Game created by FASA in 1989. Since then, it has been adapted into several different video games, each sharing the name Shadowrun.
The 1993 Shadowrun
for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, was developed by Beam Software and released by Data East. It is loosely based on the tie-in novel Never Deal with a Dragon: Jake Armitage, a Seattle-based Runner, awakens one night in the city morgue with no memory of anything — save his name, conveniently written on the slab. Following an encounter with his animal spirit guide (a mutt, if you're wondering), Jake embarks on a quest to reclaim his identity and, more urgently, escape the long reach of his old employer. The game, obviously raunchy for the mid-90s, suffered from a Troubled Production and was a financial failure, but quickly became a Cult Classic.
A year later in 1994, another game was released under the Shadowrun name for the Sega Genesis; this version was developed by Blue Sky Software. This game had a much more Wide-Open Sandbox type gameplay with more granular character customization and a less-linear story: A new hero, Joshua, is investigating the death of his brother during a botched run. To gather evidence, Joshua will have to get acquainted with Running and the various players in Seattle's underworld. Notably, this game inspired Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka to leave the field of medicine to co-found BioWare; this version is also noteworthy for being extremely faithful to the tabletop game's mechanics.
In 1996 another game titled Shadowrun was developed by Compile and released for the Sega Mega-CD system. It was never released outside of Japan, had a much more anime art style, and was loosely based on a manga which was in turn loosely based on Shadowrun.
In 2007, Shadowrun was again made as an online only (or single player with AI players) first-person shooter Video Game, developed by FASA Interactive for the Xbox 360 and Windows (intended to work only with the then-new Vista operating system, though later easily cracked to work on Windows XP). The game features a buying system which is greatly inspired by the game Counter-Strike. It is not set in the official Shadowrun timeline, but an alternate continuity invented by FASA Interactive. The PC version was the first game to use Microsoft's Games for Windows - Live Digital Rights Management system, and it was also the second game on the 360 to allow cross-play between it and PC (after the 360's 2006 port of Final Fantasy XI) as part of a heavily-advertised but very short-lived attempt to make cross-play between 360 and PC games standard.
In 2012, Harebrained Schemes declared their intention to make a Shadowrun game on Kickstarter - and exceeded its $400,000 goal in just 28 hours, making $1,889,416 total over the course of the next month. The resulting game, Shadowrun Returns, was released July 25, 2013. It now has two "expansions" (which are much more like full-blown sequels), Dragonfall and Hong Kong.
Another game came out in 2015, Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown (previously titled Shadowrun Online) after its Kickstarter campaign made $58,863 over a $500,000 goal.
- Shadowrun video games
- Anti-Hero: All of the protagonists can range from this to straight up Villain Protagonist as the games allow you to be a Noble Demon or Only in It for the Money.
- Black-and-Gray Morality: The heroes are Shadowrunners, professional criminals, but they're up against even worse people than themselves.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: In several of the games.
- Mr. Anneki and Mr. Drake for the SNES game.
- Notably averted with Mr. Tellestrian in Dead Man's Switch
- Doctor Vauclair in Dragonfall
- Josephine Tsang in Hong Kong
- Cyberpunk: The Sixth Age games are full of megacorps, cybernetic enhancements, and ruthless gangs ready to geek all of you.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Your essence pool drops in all of the games when you upgrade with cybernetics.
- Cyberspace: The Matrix is located in all of the games where you exist in a Tron-like digital world.
- Eldritch Abomination: A frequent problem in the Sixth Age and focused on in multiple games. In addition to regular spirits, there's also dragons and AI.
- Fantastic Noir: The SNES and Genesis games are both detective stories that just so happen to have cybernetics as well as evil spirits.
- Final Solution: Dragonfall is about a plot to do this to dragons.
- Future Slang: The games all incorporate the unique vernicular of the Sixth Age despite it having been removed from some editions of the tabletop game.
- Lighter and Softer: The video games allow the protagonists to achieve huge victories against the megacorps and supernatural forces of the world.
- MegaCorp: All of the games include these as background material and frequent targets for Runners.
- Path of Inspiration: The Universal Brotherhood worships Insect Spirits and wants to destroy the world.
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Zeerust: The book is a Cassette Futurism based on the ideas of cyberpunk combined with fantasy races as well as magic.
- Anti-Grinding: The game has only scripted battles which come as dictated by the linear story, and only set karma rewards. The player still gets to allocate karma as they see fit, which given the linear nature of the game can easily lead you to hit a brick wall as you are faced with a battle you cannot win because you did not improve the abilities of your characters properly.
- Random Number God: Literal six-sided dice would roll across the screen to determine results, in a deliberate callback to the tabletop rules.
- First-Person Shooter: The point of view of the game.
- In Name Only: The project for this title originally began as a series of multiplayer gameplay experiments using the Halo 2 engine. An exec at Microsoft noted that they had the Shadowrun license lying around, and figured that they ought to slap it onto this experiment. That way even if the gameplay sucked, it would still sell on the title alone. The product's producer tried to argue this with the exec, but
got overruled. He was able to successfully get the company to admit that it was only "inspired by" Shadowrun rather than trying to spin it as something canonical. - Magic Knight: All the Player Characters. However, they have to choose what magic they want to use, and different races will have different relationships with magic.