Shadowgate is a point-and-click style game of adventure and exploration originally developed by a small team at ICOM Simulations for the Macintosh. This was the third game in their "MACventure series," as the games have been affectionately dubbed. The original lineup consisted of Deva Vu, Unintived, Shadowgate, and Deja Vu 2. All but the Deja Vu sequel were later ported to the NES by Kemco.
The NES versions featured a fresh coat of paint and some tweaks with the interface. Although Deja Vu was the only MACventure title to receive a sequel during the original development, Shadowgate is the one to have persisted. There was a planned sequel that was planned out, and even mostly coded before ICOM decided that they wanted to move away from MAC development and into the fancy new consoles like the Turbografx-16. In the 90s, there were two other developers who were granted access to the design documents for Beyond Shadowgate (aka Shadowgate 2), but went rouge and did their own thing. Thus were born Beyond Shadowgate for the Turbografx and Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers for the Nintendo 64.
When the original Shadowgate team formed the Zojoi game company, they decided to bring some of their older properties to the modern era. This would eventually bring us the Shadowgate (2014) remake, as well as a VR game called Mines of Mythrock. One of the testers for Mythrock started pestering Dave Marsh to let some people make an NES-style sequel using the original designs until Dave finally relented. And that brings us to now. This game is great, and you're great for playing it. But if you're lost, you've come to the right place.
That's plenty of intro text, on with the guide!
