Trivia / Shadows of the Damned

• Acclaimed Flop: The game was adored by most critics and certainly has its fans, yet it ended up flopping so bad, it went out of print the same year it was released. Luckily, it's on Xbox's Games on Demand.
• Creator Backlash: Thanks to the Executive Meddling below, Shinji Mikami said he was somewhat disappointed by the final product, and that Suda was heartbroken.
  "It became a completely different game. That was a bit disappointing. I think Suda was unable to create the scenario he'd originally had in his head, and he rewrote the scenario several times. I think his heart was broken. He's such a unique creator, so it seems to me that he was not quite comfortable with making this game."
  • That said, it does seem that Suda has at least come to terms with the game in more recent years. He was able to rework his original vision into a manga, and it's telling that an entire chapter of Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is one long meta commentary on Shadows that even has Garcia killed off in the intro cutscene, yet still remains overly polite with its criticisms. The fact that his company is currently working on a remaster also shows that his opinion on the game, whatever it was at the time, has softened over the years.
• Executive Meddling: Well, it's an extremely creative director working with a company like EA - of course his vision isn't going to be intact. The game had gone through 5 design versions over its development until it was approved. The presence of guns in the game at all was EA's demand, for example.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, Suda and Mikami envisioned a collaboration called Kurayami, intended to be a pure Psychological Survival Horror game inspired by The Castle, though it fell into Development Hell among Grasshopper due to their inability to secure a publisher. Once Electronic Arts got involved, they had initially been on board with the concept, but then abruptly started demanding changes and reiterations, rejecting any of their more eccentric ideas in the process (Mikami believes that EA had consciously lied to them at first about interest in the game just to trap them into their whims). Shadows of the Damned — being vastly more action-y than it was meant to be — is almost an entirely different game. Remnants of the original concept were later repurposed into a manga called Kurayami Dance while the second draft has turned into Black Knight Sword.
  • Originally, Garcia would have started up without a gun, and would gradually acquire weapons over the course of the game with the ability to purchase clothes. EA decided to have him start with one from the get-go because "westerners are about guns."
  • Paula was initially designed as living inside Garcia's gun that would hop around like a rabbit, leading to a love story between them. EA was unable to grasp the concept, and it was eventually changed to the talking skull Johnson.
  • Suda says that he would have liked to add online multiplayer in some functionality.

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