Castlevania
Introduction
Castlevania was developed and published by Konami, first released on the Famicom Disk System in Japan in September 1986 before reaching the NES on cartridge the following year, alongside a same-premise MSX2 sibling title called Vampire Killer that shipped with different level design around the same time. Character designer Akihiko Nagata built the game around Simon Belmont, the latest in a hereditary line of vampire hunters tasked with entering Dracula’s castle to end his reign once and for all. Players fight their way through a series of gothic-horror stages using a whip as the primary weapon alongside sub-weapons like axes and holy water, facing off against classic monster-movie enemies such as Medusa heads, mummies, and Frankenstein’s monster before a final confrontation with Dracula himself. Its tight, deliberately weighty jump physics, memorable Kinuyo Yamashita soundtrack, and gothic art direction set the tone for the entire long-running Castlevania series that followed.
