This video game was first acknowledged by SUDA51 in the April 2006 issue of EDGE. At the time, クラヤミ was seen as GRASSHOPPER MANUFACTURE‘s next major game announcement, following the recent overall success of killer7. The truth was that artwork from クラヤミ had only been published because SUDA51 had candidly expressed some early ideas for the game in his EDGE interview, and wished for some of the artwork to be included in the article. クラヤミ was taken more seriously once Electronic Arts signed with GRASSHOPPER as a publisher, a move which was announced on August 14, 2008. In June 2009, SUDA51 repeated his statements from 2006 on the importance of light and shadows, but later in September he claimed that due to time constraints, クラヤミ was still only being discussed and not actively developed. One draft of the game from this stage was published in SUDA51 OFFICIAL COMPLETE BOOK GRASSHOPPER MANUFACTURE & HUMAN WORKS.
During this period, the scenario was rewritten numerous times at Electronic Arts’ request as it gradually morphed into a third-person shooter, Shadows of the DAMNED. The second of these Shadows of the DAMNED drafts was used as the foundation for BLACK KNIGHT SWORD. Another draft was revisited for the manga dance in the dark.
クラヤミ was originally conceived as a game for PlayStation 3, however, after Electronic Arts became involved, Xbox 360, Wii, and PC were also targeted platforms. When the game ultimately arrived in the form of Shadows of the DAMNED, it was only released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Many years after the making of クラヤミ, previously unseen artwork from the project was shown in Grasshopper Direct 2023 and later at Tadayuki Nomaru‘s 能丸督之の世界 art exhibition.
Nomenclature
- クラヤミ (能丸督之の世界 artbook)
- KULAYAMI (能丸督之の世界 artbook)
- KURAYAMI (THE ART OF GRASSHOPPER MANUFACTURE)