Playable prototype of Canceled ‘Castlevania’ Dreamcast game has been discovered! ‘Castlevania: Resurrected’ has been resurrected indeed!
Man. Never discount how much fucking lost gaming arcana is out there. The latest batch to be exhumed from the carcass of time? A playable version of Castlevania: Resurrected, the canceled Dreamcast installment of the franchise.
Polygon:
A playable version of the canceled Castlevania: Resurrection for the Dreamcast has surfaced. Preservationists have been shown a video of the prototype in action, and shared it via YouTube over the weekend.
The prototype is a build predating E3 1999, where Castlevania: Resurrection got a closed-doors demonstration. It’s a 3D platformer, with a very linear approach to its levels. The video shows the build’s unidentified finder steering Sonia Belmont through two of the five stages, which are started from a developer’s menu.
Castlevania: Resurrection would have introduced a then-new protagonist, Victor Belmont, into the world of Sonia Belmont, who debuted in 1998’s Castlevania Legends for the Game Boy. (Victor Belmont, albeit in a different form, would be introduced in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2.)
In a 2007 interview, Castlevania: Resurrection art director Greg Orduyan said that the game was internally sabotaged by “some people within Konami who had their own agenda.” Castlevania: Resurrection would have been the first Castlevania game developed by Konami of America (whose name appears on the developer disc in the video). Orduyan said the E3 demo from 1999 put disparaging rumors about the game to rest, but the PlayStation 2’s launch in 2000 obliterated Konami’s plans for Dreamcast games, Castlevania: Resurrection included.
The last original game in the Castlevania line was Lords of Shadow 2, which launched in 2014 for PlayStation 3, Windows PC, and Xbox 360. A year later, Konami began a near-wholesale retreat from current console games development, starting with the cancellation of Silent Hills and the departure of longtime designer Hideo Kojima at the end of 2015.