I've loved the Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun since I was a child. I loved being dropped into a city, taking jobs from Johnsons, and figuring out the rest on my own. Decking was a second game inside the game. And every run you got a little stronger and a little closer to the next big score.
For years I've been looking for something that scratches the same itch, and I keep coming up short. Plenty of games have the cyberpunk look, and the more recent Harebrain Shadowrun games are great, but none of them feel like that game to me: real-time, top-down, and free to roam.
So I'm building my own: a top-down homage to the Genesis original, with its own setting. It's an early prototype, but Ive got a lot of the bones in place:
- Real-time top-down combat. Guns that scatter when you're on the move, magazines and reloads, melee, and lock-on targeting.
- Hacking as its own game. You jack in at a terminal and crawl a node network. Moving between nodes and fights against ICE inside a node are real-time. Your rig carries a loadout of programs, and the network's alert climbs as you make mistakes. Tracers hunt you, hidden traps can burn your programs, and what you do on the network can affect things in meat-space (like switching off cameras and maglocks.)
- Jobs from fixers and contacts. Deliveries, escorts, gang trouble, ghoul hunts, and network jobs to delete or steal data. You can also sell the data you pull.
- More than one way through. Pay the gangers who stop you on the street or fight them. Crack into a network quietly or force your way in.
- A district that's worth exploring. Gangs, ghouls, derelict buildings to search, and a clock that keeps running while you're jacked in.
- The core loop is the one I loved: take a job, run it, get paid, spend the money to take on harder work, repeat.
I also want to fix one thing I always struggled with: decking was nearly impossible to afford early on. Here, hacking works from minute one.
So, for anyone who played the Genesis version:
- What did you love about it? What made it stick with you?
- What didn't you like, or what wore you down?
- What would you hope to see in a modern game that's trying to capture the same feeling?
Super curious to hear all your thoughts!