RETRO – The Shannara franchise is receiving a TV-series, which gets its first airing on MTV. However, let’s remember a game that was based upon Terry Brooks’ work. It was developed by Legend Entertainment and Far Studio more than two decades ago, back in 1995. You might have heard the name of the developers somewhere else…

For me, Legend Entertainment’s name is known because of a different game. This American team developed Unreal II: The Awakening. Legend grew out of Infocom (this company died in 1989), and they were in business until 2004. In this year’s early days, Atari, their owner, announced the closure of Legend strictly due to business reasons. Let’s take a look at one of the developers’ legends, sorry for the pun.

Shannara

Shannara is a classic point and click graphical game. You must move the cursor on a display that takes around two-thirds of the total screen. You can choose one of the commands on the right side. Look, speak, use and so on – you can learn the interface pretty quickly due to it being clean and easy to overlook. Because of this, you shouldn’t worry about the gameplay that much.

However, this simplicity affects the combat – outside of inventory management and the usage of the attack, retreat and defend commands; you can’t expect that much. Still, you shouldn’t forget that this is a 1995 game; back then, there was no PS4 (in fact, the PS1 was barely spreading around the world!), full HD TVs did not exist, and PCs weren’t as strong as they are now.

Back to the gameplay, you can expect a game in this genre to have great puzzles – I think it performs quite well in this aspect. The usual style of I found an item; I now have to find out where to use it kind of gameplay is presented by Legend. If I have to say a modern example of this, I’d probably mention Grim Fandango (Remastered) although Manny doesn’t have to fight like in Shannara. (That would be… interesting.)

The game might be a little too linear after figuring out the proper item usage order (and there are only five major areas), but still, I have to say that Shannara might be interesting for people that like point and click games. I don’t think it’d be fair to give any rating, so recommending the game: yes/no – I’d say yes. In fact, this might hook you on Terry Brooks’ novels. Maybe you should give his books a try, too.

Terry Brooks

I think I should also mention the guy whose work was essential to see this game created. Terry Brooks was born in 1944 in the United States. His two main inspirations would be William Faulkner (A Fable, The Reivers) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The Sword of Shannara is the very first in the Shannara franchise – Brooks wrote this in 1977. I don’t think he would have ever dreamt of his work ending up on television almost 40 years after the creation of his first book.

MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles debuted just mere days ago, and it’s spreading around the world quite fast. (For example, Hungary receives the first episode just two days after the initial airing on MTV – now that is something very uncommon in this country!)

Get some popcorn ready.

-V-