As a kid, living in Florida at the time, there was a teacher in my apartment complex who was into video games as much as I was. After going to a few video game stores with him, and playing a few video games with him and his wife here and there. He gifted me a copy of Shadowrun on the SNES when he moved out of the apartment complex. (They never had their own children, so I think they enjoyed the company.)
That being said, I had never seen anything like it, the Cyberpunk genre was first introduced to me by the Shadowrun SNES game, I thought it was a little creepy as a kid, but so damn intriguing. I also liked that it had Orcs, Ogres, Elves and all different races from what seemed like a fantasy setting. Admittedly I was never into medieval settings which seemed to be the rage in games and such during this period.
The Shadowrun SNES game was a point and click adventure game, where you had to learn and use certain words when speaking to different NPCs to unlock more dialog options. It also had shooting segments, and RPG elements for upgrading your character. They had a hacking system as well, which was a little meh in this version, but an amazing game overall. One of the best SNES soundtracks ever, in my opinion
I eventually realized there was a Sega Genesis version, I believe I purchased it used in a Blockbuster Video. To my surprise, the game was totally different! The Genesis version was a top down shooter/RPG hybrid, with some dialog elements, but not as text heavy as the SNES one, and no point and click segments. This had an amazing hacking/matrix segment too, and I was completely sucked into the story and characters. While both games are very different ,I have a lot of love for both, just in different ways.
Eventually I read some of the Shadowrun books, played the pen and paper versions (but dumbed it down for my limited knowledge of pen and paper games), and even played some of the card and action figure games, which are very enjoyable with friends.
After a lengthy period of time, a new Shadowrun game was released on the PC and the XBox 360. My friends and I spent countless hours playing this team based Shadowrun FPS on the 360, which again had drastically changed the formula. This time, it was very similar to something like Team Fortress or Counter Strike, but each race (Orc, Elf, Dwarf, Human etc.) had different positives and negatives, as well as equippable spells and weapons. We loved it so much, that I had bought my friend a copy on PC for when he went to veterinarian school out of the country so we could cross play on the PC/Xbox 360. This was a fairly new mechanic with gaming during this period.
When Shadowrun Online was announced on Kickstarter, I had kicked in over $120 towards the development of the game. I was a bit let down by the final project which had been skewed from the initial design conception from being an online Shadowrun game, to a hub/mission based game with multiplayer. It turned into more of a Diablo-Esque affair, which was still good. But not exactly what I had expected. The name was also changed to Shadowrun: Boston Lockdown, to reflect this divergence from being a purely online game.
Shadowrun Returns came out on PC as well around the same time and perfectly brought back the mythology and gameplay from the original SNES/Genesis games, and in my eyes really did a huge service to continuing the settings and stories from the original games. I had gotten this game digitally by winning it in a friend's YouTube contest.
I believe Microsoft now owns the rights to Shadowrun, or perhaps used to. Hopefully now that Cyberpunk has been released, even if it was panned, it renews some interest in the license and universe.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. ;)
See you in the shadows, chummers!