Now in collaboration with Limited Run Games and Modern Vintage Gamer, WayForward have revived the original Shantae title, republished, enhanced, and ready to dance on Nintendo Switch.
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An incredibly impressive figure for a series that initially struggled for financial success! Screw BitCoin, I’m going back in time to tell myself to invest in Shantae.
Almost 20 years since its inception, WayForward’s flagship character now boasts five separate entries and over 3 million sales across the entire series. Additionally, gaining quite a cult following, it has become one of the most valuable games on the handheld, with original boxed copies occasionally going for upwards of $3000USD. Shantae’s stylish character design definitely put WayForward on the (treasure) map.ĭespite its poor sales performance, the original Shantae is widely-recognised as one of the best games released for the GameBoy, and it pushed the hardware to its limit. In a bold move, the game was developed entirely for the GameBoy Colour and released in 2002 after the launch of the GameBoy Advance, a choice that game director Matt Bozon says contributed to the game’s poor sales.
Conceptualised in the mid-’90s during the boom of Nintendo’s killer handheld, the Gameboy, it wasn’t until the end of the console’s life cycle that Shantae made her debut on the videogame stage. I’m of course talking about the entrancing, belly-dancing, eponymous Half-Genie Hero: Shantae. However, one WayForward series stands hips and shoulders above the rest. Kyoko and Misako fight for their boyfriends in River City Girls (2019) Memorable titles like Ducktales: Remastered, Aliens: Infestation, and most recently River City Girls have well and truly proven the studio’s knack for creating modern side-scrolling games and keeping this retro genre alive. Though the company was founded in 1990, it’s not been until the last decade that they’ve become a common household name. WayForward, an independent videogame developer and publisher based in California, have certainly made reputation for themselves over the last decade. That was a mighty leap, visually and functionally, and a great number of publishers made use of that leap.How does the Half-Genie Hero’s debut hold up after almost 20 years?
It was 2X the power and 3X the RAM (at a time where every single bit of bits mattered tremendously) the image jumped from 4 shades of green/grey to a 15-bit palette with up to 56 colors at a time.
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It feels weird to call a new platform a full generation when its own platform holder isn't a part of that generation (though as a Vita fan, maybe I should keep quiet.)īy the way though, people shouldn't be so swift to dismissal of the spec boost from Game Boy to Game Boy Color. The only questions lingering in calling it a new generation (aside from how impactful that market was there's a ton of DSiWare games, but I don't know of a lot of success stories, though admittedly those numbers were rarely shared) would be that Nintendo itself hardly supported DSiWare a few ArtStyle minigames, a few spun-out packets of Electroplankton and Game&Watch, one rare Zelda 4Swords app, and that was kind of it.
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Many buyers sat it out (and DS itself probably would have stood just fine without a successor and any spec increase if it hadn't been unprepared for the digital game download revolution) but the fact that DSi allowed for game downloading opened up a totally new market for the platform. We can consider DSi a new generation if we need to do that.
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