Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered recently launched on PC and consoles, which let players experience (or re-experience) this bizarre third-person shooter made by Suda51 (The creator of No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw and more) and Shinji Mikami (The “father” of the Resident Evil franchise).
Players who may have already beaten this remaster may already want more, so where’s the sequel to Shadows of the Damned, exactly? The thing is, it already exists inside another Suda51 game, as a parody of Shadows of the Damned‘s troubled development history which, of course, has something to do with its original publisher: Electronic Arts.
Shadows of the Damned fans can try out its sequel in Travis Strikes Again
In case you forgot, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is a 2019 video game by Suda51 that served as a stepping point between No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle and No More Heroes 3, which he eventually released in 2021. In his first adventure in over 9 years, series’ protagonist Travis Touchdown forcefully teams up with Badman and gets inside the digital world of the Death Drive MK-II, a mysterious video game console that will grant them a wish if they complete every single one of its games.
So, Travis has to acquire different spherical cartridges called “Death Balls” that hold a different fictional video game inside, and the same character actually developed all of them: Dr. Juvenile. At one point, Travis is looking for the only copy of Serious Moonlight, an ambitious RPG that Juvenile never released. He eventually locates the Death Ball that one of Juvenile’s former colleagues, Damon Riccitiello, took many years in the past.
Travis beats Damon up, gets the Death Ball and when he pops up Serious Moonlight on the Death Drive MK-II both he and the player encounter a huge surprise: an HD cutscene that shows Garcia Hotspur, the protagonist of Shadows of the Damned, escaping from demons and an unknown character, who eventually captures and manages to kill him. In his last moments, he gives all his power to his comedic gun sidekick, Johnson, who transforms into a bizarre superhero figure named Eight Hearts.
Introducing: Damned: Dark Knight!
In one of the most unexpected yet brilliant moments ever put in a No More Heroes game, players find out that Dr. Juvenile completely scrapped Serious Moonlight because the technology of the time couldn’t realize a game of such a big scope. Instead, she decided to make an unofficial sequel to one of her favorite games, Shadows of the Damned, simply titled Damned: Dark Knight.
Travis and Badman have to complete it in order to continue their adventure through the Death Drive MK-II’s catalog. Needless to say, Suda51 and his team filled the entire level with references to the original Shadows of the Damned, as the characters have to explore and fight enemies in locations from the game, while the player reads dialogue that references its many bosses and events. This is an absolute treat for fans of this third-person shooter, and it proves that Suda51 still has some appreciation for the project.
Naturally, Eight Hearts is the final boss of the Damned: Dark Knight, and Travis immediately recognizes him because he’s a self-proclaimed big Shadows of the Damned fan who even played through the original game more than 3 times. After he kills Eight Hearts, Johnson talks with Garcia again, goes through a circled portal to the “4th Dimension” and promises to save his friend from that Hell.
Travis even concludes this exciting level with the phrase, “So, Garcia Hotspur is coming back. One more thing to look for…”, which seems to have foreshadowed Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered, years before Grasshopper Manufacture announced it.
So, why did Suda51 did all of this?
For more context, it’s important that we remember the messy development history that Shadows of the Damned went through. This was a joint venture between Suda51 and Shinji Mikami (Both had previously worked together on 2005’s Killer7) and their original concept was simply titled Kurayami. This was going to be a psychological horror game with little-to-no combat and no guns at all, and with art inspired by The Castle, by Franz Kafka.
All this sounded very different from what Shadows of the Damned is and this is because everything changed when Electronic Arts entered the frame. At one point, Suda51 and Mikami managed to get in touch with EA in order to get funding for their new project, since it was much more ambitious than anything they had done before. They pitched the idea to EA and, according to Mikami in an interview with the YouTube channel Archipel, the executives “lied” when they said they liked it and the project began slowly “fading away”.
Electronic Arts’ frustrating changes to Suda and Mikami’s vision
It didn’t take long for the upper management at EA to begin interfering with the production of Kurayami and forced Suda51 and Mikami to change things. In the book The Art of Grasshopper Manufacture, Suda51 revealed that EA insisted on including guns in the game because “Westerners are about guns”, which forced them to turn it into a third-person shooter. He also shared another story in the same book, detailing how Garcia was originally going to have a small fairy named Paula that came out of his gun, but EA didn’t like his concept and preferred a classic “damsel in distress” love story, so Suda51 turned her in the main love interest in the final game.
According to Mikami, EA twisted their original concept around several times, and it resulted in a completely different game that what they originally thought of, since they had to write the script over and over until the company green light it. Not even their main character was safe, as Suda51 revealed in an interview with Gamespot that he came up with 3 or 4 different ideas for a protagonist until he finally landed on Garcia Hotspur, who EA apparently liked.
Something that most fans miss is that neither Suda51 nor Mikami directed Shadows of the Damned, as its main director was actually Massimo Guarini, a western developer who had years of experience working with Ubisoft, so he could more efficiently comply with EA’s demands. When the company completely overhauled the project, it was immediately evident that Suda51 was not enjoying its development anymore. He became hesitant to disclose details of the game on interviews and events, as IGN noted in not one but two different interviews with him.
Shadows of the Damned broke Suda51’s heart
When EA and Grasshopper Manufacture finally released Shadows of the Damned on June 21, 2011, it received generally positive reviews, but it unfortunately didn’t sell very well in neither North America nor Japan. As for Suda51 and Shinji Mikami, they both have come out and stated how disappointed they were by EA’s interference on multiple occasions.
In an interview with PSX Extreme, Mikami stated, “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 making this game”. As for Suda himself, in the aforementioned Gamespot video he said: “If I ever happen to work with EA again, I’d really appreciate it if they just… okay’d the first version of the script next time”.
But Suda got his revenge… in an unconventional form
Let’s go back to Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes for a moment. This odd title is not just another entry in the No More Heroes series, but it’s also a deep look at Suda51’s career as game development, with references to both his highest highs and his lowest lows. At many points during the game, it’s quite obvious that he created Dr. Juvenile as a stand-in for himself, and the same is true for her longtime rival, Damon Riccitiello.
Damon developed Serious Moonlight alongside Juvenile, and he later beat her up in order to steal the Death Ball that had Damned: Dark Knight inside, that’s why Travis eventually had to hunt him down. But that’s not all, because Damon would later appear in No More Heroes 3 as the main antagonist of the game. In the final battle, Travis finally kills Damon in a bizarre yet amusing parody of the Super Smash Bros series.
In case you didn’t know, John Riccitiello was the CEO of Electronic Arts between 2007 and 2013, meaning that he was most likely around the time Shadows of the Damned entered development. Now, Suda never explicitly stated that Damon is based off of him, but the unique last name of Riccitiello, coupled with the villain’s status as a former game developer who became CEO of a gigantic corrupt company clearly indicates that Damon is a parody of John Riccitiello and that Suda51 was trying to get even with the CEO that interfered with the development of one his beloved projects.
Despite everything, Suda51 clearly appreciates Shadows of the Damned
At one point, Suda also revealed that No More Heroes 3 was originally going to have an entire sequence that would feature Shadows of the Damned characters, which would have made the reference to its tumultuous development even more obvious.
At the end of the day, Suda51 has clearly made his peace with Shadows of the Damned, and he likely holds some level of appreciation for this tragic project. This is evident not only in the references he included in Travis Strikes Again and No More Heroes 3 but, also in his active participation in the marketing for Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered.
Considering that Electronic Arts has nothing to do with the remaster and that Grasshopper Manufacture is currently listed as it’s sole publisher, it seems that EA finally sold the rights back to Suda and his company. Fun fact: Grasshoper included Eight Hearts as an alternate costume for Garcia in Hella Remastered, which is a fun nod to one of the most bizarre yet clever things Suda51 ever did in one of his games. Maybe this means that soon we’ll finally get to see a full fledged version of Damned: Dark Knight, but only time will tell…
Published: Nov 3, 2024 06:30 am