Shadow Knights

Shadow Knights is a platform game. The player goes through nine levels, slaying enemies with both sword and magic stars and collecting powerups. The player has limited vitality and magic power to survive. The player can accumulate power by collecting magic orbs.

The ninja has healing and weapon powers. Some level areas require the player to defeat a boss monster to progress.

The prospering land of Naipusan falls under siege by warriors from the North led by the evil shogun Sashika. For many years Sashika grew in power and began learning dark magic. Some said that Sashika was possessed by the demon Kuskuro. In the wake of the never-ending reign of terror, a ninja born in the east whose arrival foretold by sages comes to remove Sashika from his seat of power and rule Naipusan fairly.

Before video game company id Software was founded by John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall on February 1st, 1991, its four founders worked as employees at the software company Softdisk. There they worked on a PC game subscription service called Gamer's Edge. In October 1990, the team completed work on the game Slordax: The Unknown Enemy, a vertically scrolling shooter for Gamer's Edge. During that month, programmer John Carmack further extended the smooth scrolling technique with the ability to scroll in horizontal direction.

Impressed by this technology, the team made plans to startup their own company and produce their own platform game. However, to ensure a stable income, they kept their day jobs at Softdisk for the time being. During the day they worked for Softdisk on Gamer's Edge, while during the evenings and weekends they worked on their own platform game: Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons.

Gaming website IGN describes the console-style action in Shadow Knights as impressive for an MS-DOS title of that time period. However, IGN concludes that the game does not look as pretty as Commander Keen and is also smaller in size. Kotaku summarizes Shadow Knights as "id does Shinobi".