Castlevania has a long history of sudden reinvention. The series went from a linear platformer to making up one-half of an entire genre name in Metroidvania. It also, at the same time, went 3D to far less fanfare. Throughout the N64 and PS2 generations, Konami tried to do more of the 3D stuff than the Metroidvania stuff, which sandwiched the long-lost Castlevania Resurrection for the Dreamcast.
A video of the game was put up over the weekend, brought to light by a Dreamcast Preservationist group that wanted to show the prototype in action.
The prototype disc is from a build before the Resurrection’s first and only behind-closed-doors E3 showing in 1999. The game was apparently battling internal drama within Konami as the first American-made Castlevania game, with art director Greg Orduyan claiming in 2007 that people in the company were leaking false concerns to the press to poison the well. Presumably, also, the death of the Dreamcast contributed to the game’s cancellation.
The game starred Sonia Belmont, who was at that point the first Belmont to canonically defeat Dracula before Castlevania: Lament of Innocence changed that. In those days, series producer Koji Igarashi bafflingly questioned the validity of a woman defeating Dracula in the middle ages, despite making the protagonists of several of his next few games women. Sonia still got her GBC game, Castlevania Legends, before Resurrection folded though.
Resurrection would have also added Victor Belmont, a Belmont clan member who looked just an absolute gobsmacking amount like Tim Curry.
Anyone hoping for a resurrection of Resurrection shouldn’t hold their breath, as Konami seems well and truly out of the internal video game development at this point. If we ever see another truly original Castlevania game period, I’d be fairly surprised, though delighted.
