Manilla Road was an American heavy metal band from Wichita, Kansas, founded by Mark "The Shark" Shelton (vocals, guitar) and Scott "Scooter" Park (bass).

Achieving moderate success in the mid-80s with several well-received releases such as Crystal Logic (1983), Open the Gates (1985) and The Deluge (1986), the band became known for both the nasal voice of vocalist Mark Shelton and his eclectic style of songwriting, with many of his compositions taking place in fantastical universes combining elements of ancient mythologies and of popular culture mythos such as Robert E. Howard's Conan and H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu.

Seemingly forgotten, Manilla Road was re-discovered by the metal scene after performing at the Bang Your Head festival in 2000,[1] which resulted in the band signing a new record deal and the eventual releases of Atlantis Rising in 2001[2] and Spiral Castle in 2002.

[3] This second era of Manilla Road continued until the death of founder Mark Shelton, who died in 2018 the day after the band played in an outdoor festival in Germany.

The band then proceeded to record a three-songs demo in 1979 titled Manilla Road Underground, which around a hundred copies on cassette were distributed to local radio stations and simply anyone who would listen.

With Fisher agreeing to step down, Shelton and Park went searching for a drummer who could play double bass drums, in accordance with their newly evolving sound.

Along with Crystal Logic, the new lineup's first two albums, Open the Gates (1985) and The Deluge (1986) are generally considered to be classics in the field of early epic heavy metal.

Problems also began to surface for Manilla Road as Mystification suffered from exceptionally poor production quality, a result from the substandard equipment used at a new studio the band hoped would improve their sound.

The album was initially released by American label Leviathan Records (David Chastain's) instead of Black Dragon due to their distribution issues.

Mark Shelton formed a band signed under Black Dragon Records called The Circus Maximus along with Andrew Coss and Aaron Brown, who did the front cover artwork for both Out of the Abyss and The Courts of Chaos.

This reformation period for Manilla Road also had its first lineup change with Harvey Patrick leaving the band and Mark Anderson taking his place at the bass.

From this album going forward (with the exception of Voyager), co-singer Bryan Patrick began to be much more implicated in the singing of the songs, eventually more or less splitting the workload with Shelton.

The success the re-emerging band was enjoying however was not enough to prevent yet another round of lineup changes, with drummer Scott Peters and bassist Mark Anderson both leaving and getting replaced by Cory Christner at the drums and Harvey Patrick returning to the fold at the bass.

With both Gates of Fire and Voyager receiving again praise in the metal community, the band put out their fifteenth studio album in 2011 titled Playground of the Damned.

The 11-minute song serving as the album's title track is a retelling of the last days of Shelton's great-great-great uncle, Ludwig Leichhardt, a 19th-century German explorer who vanished in the Australian interior during an expedition.

A double CD reissue of the Mark of the Beast album (bundled with the 1979 demo Manilla Road Underground and After Midnight in-studio live performance) was released in 2016 by High Roller Records, this time under the correct original 1981 title Dreams of Eschaton.

A GoFundMe campaign established to help fund Shelton's body repatriation to the United States and subsequent funeral expenses was met with quick success with over US$40,000 raised in less than 48 hours.