Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #47

Vampire Killer

Oh, the wide world of video-game history: What an amazingly expansive place it was turning out to be! As I was exploring it, I continued to be blown away by its sheer scope. I was so astonished by all of the new discoveries that I was making, in fact, that I was having trouble taking it all in!

I mean, here I was uncovering dozens of games and platforms about which I'd previously never heard or read! "How in the world did I miss all of this?" I wondered. "And how much more haven't I learned about yet?"

It was an amazingly enlightening experience!

And there was so much more to it: At the same time, my frequent forum-visits and random Yahoo! searches were consistently providing me exciting new information about company histories and unsung gaming eras. Retrospectives were informing me of connections and partnerships that I never knew about. And dedicated fan sites were teaching me that my favorite series were far larger and more ubiquitous than I ever could have imagined.

I was making new discoveries with each and every mouse-click!

This was a far cry from where I was a few weeks earlier, when I'd just taken my first steps into the Internet world. At that point in time, I believed that I was fairly knowledgeable about the medium's history. Because after all: I'd grown up surrounded by video games, and I'd witnessed each phase of their evolution. So I had every reason to believe that I was an authority on subject!

I mean, sure: I couldn't have told you which companies manufactured the ColecoVision and the Intellivision or named more than three Apple Macintosh games, but I knew enough, dammit! I had extensive knowledge of the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64, the NES, and their respective libraries, and I was aware that Super Mario Bros. 2 was a conversion of a Japanese Famicom Disk System game called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic, so therefore, I was certain, I was an expert on the subject of gaming history!

"And even if it can be proven that my grasp of the subject is shakier than I claim it to be," I thought, "then I can still take comfort in knowing that I'm an expert when it comes to things like, say, the Castlevania series, which I've been following almost since its inception!"

Yet even that belief didn't hold up, and there I was, in early 1999, coming to grips with the true depth of my ignorance as I feverishly navigated my way around The Castle Dungeon's Vampire Killer page and continued to express shock at what I was reading.

This wasn't the first time I'd been in a situation like this one, no. At previous points, I suddenly learned about Japan-only games like Dracula X: Chi no Rondo and Akumajou Dracula (the Sharp X68000 version), and in each instance, I felt astonished by what I'd discovered.

But those two games hit me in a different way: I wasn't as surprised by them. Their existence was fathomable to me because I was very much aware of post-'92-Konami's penchant for disregarding built-in audiences and moving its series to different, often-unproven platforms. So I could absolutely imagine a scenario in which the company spent years bouncing the Castlevania series around from one obscure platform to the next.

I had a much harder time conceiving of Vampire Killer because it was made during a much earlier period and a time when Castlevania and Konami's other foundational series entries were understood to be intrinsically linked to the NES and wholly defined by the console's technical specifications.

"They were born from the NES," I'd always believed, "and couldn't possibly be reproduced faithfully on other platforms!"

But now I was being told that this wasn't true and that Casltevania, which I had always been proud to champion as an NES original, had a port that was living its life on computers--a platform that I perceived to be incompatible with action games of Castlevania's type. (I regarded the Commodore 64 port of Castlevania, which I'd long known about, as more of a compromised interpretation of a classic. I didn't believe that it was meant to be taken seriously.)

I was so blown away by this discovery that I couldn't help but excitedly scour the Internet in search of more information. As I was in the process of doing so, I stumbled across a rather humble MSX fan site that just happened to feature a small collection of Vampire Killer screenshots. And as The Castlevania Dungeon's description of the game suggested, it did indeed look remarkably similar to Castlevania!

But when I started to more closely examine the screenshots, I began to feel as though Vampire Killer couldn't have been a port of Castlevania. Because there were simply too many inconsistencies: Simon Belmont's garb was purple and black rather than the normal orange and brown. The colors were uncharacteristically vibrant. The background imagery was cleanly textured and actually discernible. There were unfamiliar-looking enemies and environments. There was, according to what the HUD depicted, an expanded inventory system. And in one particular screenshot, Simon was interacting with what appeared to be a merchant!

So this certainly wasn't the Castlevania that I knew.

"What is it, then?" I wondered. "Is it a remake or weird interpretation of Castlevania? Or is it, perhaps, a highly derivative sequel that was never released outside of Japan?" (Because its Japanese title was exactly the same as Castlevania's Japanese title, I felt safe in ruling out the latter possibility.)

"And what the hell is an 'MSX,' anyway?" I also wondered.

I had a lot of questions.

I spent the next hour or so reading up on the MSX's history and acquainting myself with its library, which, to my surprise, contained a bunch of other familiar-looking games. I'm talking about games like Gradius, Metal Gear, Contra, Bubble Bobble, The Legend of Kage, and many others that I'd always believed to be NES exclusives.

It turned out that they weren't. They were multiplatform games, and, astonishingly, most of them actually started their lives on the MSX!

I was stunned by this news. It completely shattered my conception of gaming history.

Honestly, I was confused by much of what I'd read: The MSX, apparently, had a number of alternate models, a laundry list of separate vendors, and a series of divergent-sounding successors. MSX computers were commercially available in all territories, but allegedly, only a small number of them were shipped to North America (they were part of a "limited release," according to certain parties). And some people claimed that Konami and Microsoft had a hand in establishing the MSX brand while others cast doubt on that idea.

None of the information was solid, so I didn't know what to think about the MSX. I still wasn't sure what, exactly, it was.

As best I could tell, the MSX was closely equivalent to the Commodore 64 and shared many of its values, and that made it instantly appealing to me. And that it was said to be the earliest testing ground for companies like Konami and Hudson Soft, whose games I'd been playing and enjoying for over 13 years, only heightened my interest.

So it worked out that I became more intrigued by the MSX than the game that led me to it! There was such a strong aura of mystery surrounding the platform, and my sense was that delving into its world would help me to uncover the exciting secret origins of quite a few of my favorite games and series!

At that point in time, though, I wasn't able to satiate my curiosity and further explore the MSX's library because the current circumstances made it too difficult for me to do so. Basically, I was still new to emulation, and I found emulator programs to be a troublesome combination of complicated and intimidating (also, I didn't know anything about "BIOS files" and had no idea where I could find them).

I didn't really understand most of them or know how to properly operate them.

However, playing Vampire Killer was still a possibility, and it turned out that there was an easy way to do it: At the time, The Castlevania Dungeon just happened to be hosting a convenient batch file that allowed you to bypass the emulator's intricate setup process and run the game with a simple double-click!

So I downloaded the batch file and promptly ran it!

And I looked forward to the moment because booting up an old platform for the first time was always a captivating experience for me. I likened it to witnessing the discovery of a mythical artifact. It was that exciting.

That's how it was with my formal introduction to the MSX: As I watched it boot up, I was in complete captivation, and as the MSX logo emerged from the boot screen's beautiful, entrancing bright-blue background, I felt a wave of history washing over me and carrying me over to a wonderfully mysterious new world.

And my sense of excitement only heightened when Konami's famous logo flashed onscreen, because its presence made me realize that I was about to find out what one of my favorite developers had been building in secret during the mid-80s. "I'm about to get one of the greatest history lessons ever!" I sensed.

By the time Vampire Killer's title screen came into view, I was thoroughly engrossed in the moment, so much so that I made the conscious decision to refrain from touching the keyboard or my Gravis gamepad. I did so because I wanted to begin the proceedings by watching the game's demo sequence and soaking in both Vampire Killer's and the MSX's every vibe. I wanted to savor the moment.

So I spent several minutes doing just that.

And in that time, I was struck by the surreality of the moment: Here I was, about to play one of my all-time-favorite game's long-lost twins and find out if it was capable of living up to its sibling's legacy. It was actually happening!

As soon as I was ready to start, I pressed the space bar and did so with the sense that this was the closest that I'd ever come to getting an opportunity to re-experience Castlevania for the first time.

I was as psyched as I could be!

I spent the entirety of my first session being fascinated by how Vampire Killer's surface-deep similarities to Castlevania belied its astonishingly distinct design qualities. It seemed crazy to me that two products could look so much alike yet differ so significantly in terms of gameplay!

"How did this happen?" I continued to wonder as I played. "How did two games that were created from the very same template turn out to be so radically different?!"

Vampire Killer's stages were structurally similar to Castlevania's, as I expected them to be, but, in a curious twist, they weren't side-scrolling nature. Rather, they were comprised of a series of individual screens, and they were broken up into three or four self-contained sections, many of which were programmed to loop. And I found everything about that style of design to be weird yet very creative. "What an interesting take on Castlevania's level design!" I thought.

The goal in each stage wasn't to rush on through to the endpoint, no. Rather, you were tasked with meticulously exploring its separate sections in search of big white keys, which could then be used to open the sections' locked doors.

Vampire Killer was basically a puzzle-platformer, and I was fine with that because I was a big fan of puzzle-platformers and puzzle-based action games in general.

So this game was right up my alley!

Also, there were merchants, as the screenshots suggested, and they were hanging out all over the castle. Some of them were out in the open, while others were hiding behind destructible walls and blocks (not surprisingly, the latter merchant type, which was harder to find, usually sold more-desirable items).

The merchants asked for hearts in return for their goods, and their presence immediately reminded me of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest's merchants and shop system.

"This must be where the idea came from!" I thought to myself with an excited energy. Because I'd just discovered the secret origin of the oddball sequel's most interestingly divergent systems! It actually wasn't as novel as I thought.

If anything, the merchants' presence created a spiritual connection between the two games--a shared vibe--and consequently helped to make Simon's Quest feel less anomalous. "So it turns out that Simon's Quest isn't really a radical departure from an established norm, no," I came to realize. "Rather, it's a split evolution of Vampire Killer, which is very much a foundational series entry, and thus every bit as conventionally iterative as Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse and the rest!"

It couldn't have been a coincidence then, I thought, that one of the items for sale was a shield that functioned similarly to the one that you obtained in Simon's Quest. Its inclusion only strengthened the idea that Vampire Killer was the breeding ground for a lot of the systems and mechanics that appeared in future series games.

"I can't believe how influential this obscure computer game is," I continued to think to myself as I observed what Vampire Killer was doing.

Vampire Killer felt like a true computer game because it was, like so many others of its kind, rife with arcanity. Mainly, there were a ton of collectible items, half of which had no obvious use, and naturally the game didn't explain what any of them did.

It was like I was back in 1984, playing Commodore 64 games and having no idea what I was doing. "This feels very familiar," I thought.

I was confused about multiple game elements: I wasn't sure how the inventory system was supposed to function or if all of that space in the HUD could actually be used for anything. I couldn't figure out how to correctly use the sub-weapons (as far as I could tell, using them was a matter of applying certain types of directional input while you were aerial, but it wasn't clear to me what those inputs actually were). And I was perplexed by certain stage sections because I didn't know that the looping mechanic was applied vertically, too. (Because why would I ever think that diving into an apparent death pit would help to advance? My 18-plus years of experience told me that doing so would probably be a bad idea.)

Having access to a manual might have alleviated some of my confusion, sure, but that wasn't really an option for me. Because it was 1999, and those types of items simply didn't exist on the Internet at that point in history.

Information about the game was so scarce back then, in fact, that my placing an image of a potion on my Vampire Killer page and describing what it did instantly made my site the number-one source of information for the game!

That's how bad the situation was.

Honestly, though, I didn't mind being in the dark about certain game elements. I liked it when most of them were arcane and cryptic. Elements of their type helped computer games to possess an important air of mystery. And Vampire Killer very much had that quality to it. It was, like so many of my computer favorites, wonderfully mysterious in character.

I didn't get very far into Vampire Killer that day, so I wasn't yet prepared to make a final judgment on its quality. The only thing that I felt comfortable saying was that it wasn't in the league of Castlevania. Its action and level design simply weren't as good as the latter's, and its mechanics and systems were clearly rough and unpolished.

Still, though, I felt that Vampire Killer had a lot going for it: It was creative. It was experimental in a fascinating way. Its unmistakable computer-game vibe helped it to generate a wonderfully mysterious atmosphere (the way in which in conveyed atmosphere reminded me a lot of how my Commodore 64 favorites did so). And because it encompassed so much unknown history, it had a powerful allure to it, and consequently it made me feel as though it was a lost treasure and one that only a few people had ever laid eyes on. And I was, I felt, one of those who was lucky enough to have done so.

For all of those reasons, I was looking forward to exploring the game more thoroughly.

In my subsequent sessions, I focused on exploring the game and discovering its depth, as I'd planned to do, but I also dedicated plenty of time to comparing it to Castlevania and gaining a sense of how divergent it actually was.

By then, I'd become obsessed with comparing the two games and making note of every difference that existed between them, no matter how trivial it was. At the start, I focused mostly on the visuals--a category in which Vampire Killer clearly had an edge. Its colors were sharper and more vivid. Its textures were cleaner and smoother. And its backgrounds were superiorly rendered and more easily discernible, and thus they were able to stir my imagination in ways that Castlevania's often-messy-looking depictions couldn't.

(My favorite visual was Stage 07's large, rectangular portal, which gave view to a shadowy assemblage of evergreens that was set against an eerie dark-blue sky. The resulting image told me so much about the game's world, and it stirred my imagination in a grand way.

Vampire Killer was loaded with fantastic little graphical details like that one.)

Then I compared the games' soundtracks, both of which contained all of the same tunes.

What I found was that Vampire Killer's renditions had a subdued energy to them, and that wasn't surprising to me because old computers tended to have sound chips that produced deep, heavy notes and thus relaxed-sounding music. What that energy did, I felt, was infuse the game's renditions with an "investigate" quality and a style of composition that was perfectly suited for Vampire Killer, which was more exploration-based in nature. It produced the kind of atmosphere that you'd want to be enveloped in while you were leisurely searching and exploring a creepy old castle.

I didn't feel as though Vampire Killer's tunes were as good as Castlevania's, but still I liked them a lot, and I was really fond of what they did for the game.

And I spent the rest of the time comparing the games' enemy casts, which were also largely similar. The only real difference was that Vampire Killer's contained an exclusive enemy: a small slime creature. Its inclusion provided me even more evidence that Vampire Killer was a testing ground for the series as a whole, and at the same time, its presence created the sense that Vampire Killer was a curiously weird amalgamation of Castlevania and Simon's Quest.

That, ultimately, was how I came to view Vampire Killer: "It's basically a combination of Castlevania and Simon's Quest," I felt.

And I loved that it gave me that impression because the idea of those two games being combined into a single game sounded amazing to me!

Vampire Killer broke from Castlevania's template in one other notable way: Its final stage was much longer, and its Castle Keep, in particular, was expanded upon and now comprised a fully developed, visually distinct stage section. And that, I thought, was an important point of differentiation (though, I still preferred Castlevania's keep section because its being closely trimmed and unpopulated made it more unease-inducing and thus helped it to build tension and drama).

Also, its version of Dracula had a unique final form: Dracula's giant self-portrait, which comprised almost the entire background (he'd possess it after you destroyed his ghostly first form). The portrait spewed streams of arcing bats whose purpose was to prevent you from safely climbing to the room's top platforms and striking the portrait's weak point: the glowing gem on its figure's forehead.

This fight was interesting to me because of how different it was from the one you had with Castlevania's large blue demon, but honestly, I didn't like it all that much. I found it to be annoying and more difficult than it needed to be.

It was nice, though, that Vampire Killer had an actual epilogue. It was short and rather unsatisfying, but still it had an element that Castlevania's ending was severely lacking: storyline value. It explained what happened in following and gave me an idea of what to expect in the future, which were two things that Castlevania's faux-credits sequence naturally failed to do.

My overall feeling was that Vampire Killer wasn't as good as Castlevania, but I wasn't ready to explain how I made that determination. Because at the time, I was still too fascinated with the game's existence to care about deeply analyzing its quality.

In truth, I discovered a lot of the aforementioned weeks and months later. That was the case because of Vampire Killer's most unfortunate issue: It had no continues! You had to beat it in one sitting. And that was a problem because it was an extremely difficult game. It was, in my estimation, the series' toughest game by a very wide margin.

Seriously: It made Castlevania look like Yoshi's Story!

The problem was how it achieved that status. It didn't do so by being conventionally difficult, no. Its high difficulty wasn't really a product of its having tough enemies, brain-melting puzzles, or anything like that. What made it extremely difficult, rather, were its rough, irksome late-game platforming segments ("rough spots," as I called sequences of their type), in which you were likely to dump all of your lives in a matter of seconds.

The most ridiculous of those segments was Stage 4's water section, which frequently challenged you to ride on moving platforms and do so while dealing with the fishmen who were emerging from the water below. This segment was the reason why I couldn't advance any farther into the game. It destroyed me every time!

After a while, I gave up on the idea of clearing that stage legitimately and resorted to using Konami's "Game Master" cheating device (an emulated version of it, of course) to advance past it and reach the subsequent stages (which was I was required to do because I needed to snap screenshots for my Vampire Killer page!).

It took me about a year of off-on-play to finally reach Vampire Killer's endgame portion without the device. That's how difficult the game was.

My final verdict was that Vampire Killer was unpolished and mechanically rough but still a good game. I liked it a lot. I was fond of all of the unique systems and mechanics it introduced, and I was impressed with its visuals and music and the alluringly distinctive atmosphere that they created.

I was very happy to have discovered the game.

But in the years that followed, I didn't really play it all that much. I refrained from revisiting it frequently because I feared the aforementioned platforming segments. They were too rough, and I didn't want to put myself in a position in which I'd have to restart the entire game every time time I failed to clear them. That kind of repetition simply wasn't fun to me.

So I rarely returned to the game.

In retrospect, though, I wish that I'd spent more time with Vampire Killer. Because it truly is a fascinating game, and I feel that I missed out on creating a significant number of memorable gaming experiences by not replaying it back in the early 2000s, when I was still astonished by its existence, and seeking to derive more enjoyment from its divergent elements and what they produced: an incredibly interesting, creative variant of one of my all-time-favorite NES games.

I regret that I allowed myself to miss such opportunities. I can see, now, that doing so was really dumb.

Because the fact is that Vampire Killer is truly worthy of that kind of attention. It's not as good as Castlevania or any of the series' other stage-based games, no, but still it holds great appeal. It's a game that all series fans should play at least once, if even for a few minutes, and do so simply to get a sense of history and understand why the game is so important to the series' evolution.

If you're a Castlevania fan, it's absolutely worth your time to seek out Vampire Killer and spend some time playing it and observing what it does.

What's funny is that for the longest time, I mistakenly believed Vampire Killer to be the "series' origin." Because that's what the evidence told me it was: It was noticeably unpolished; some of its mechanics felt raw; and everything about its level design screamed "experimental." And those could be only be, I thought, the qualities of a series' very first entry. "Surely this game is the rough draft from which the more-fleshed-out Castlevania was born," I felt safe in concluding.

But it turned out that it wasn't the series' first entry, no. It was, I learned later on, actually developed in parallel with Castlevania, and it released one month after the latter. Also, its development was shrouded in mystery. There was no clear explanation for how it came to be, and there was no way of knowing how many additional secrets were hiding beneath its exterior.

In that sense, Vampire Killer was the perfect metaphor for the MSX and what it meant to me. It represented everything that fascinated me about the platform.

That's why it'll always be intrinsically linked to the platform in my mind.

My perception of the MSX hasn't changed since 1999. I still see it as being an enchantingly curious and mysterious platform. That's why it's near the top of the list of platforms that I look forward to more thoroughly exploring in the future. I know that when I do so, I'm going to make even more astonishing discoveries!

As for Vampire Killer: I'll continue to love that it exists and strongly appreciate what it represents. And at the same time, I'll continue to eagerly obsess over the astounding fact that it reveals: that one of my NES favorites has a long-lost fraternal twin that was secretly hiding in the shadows and quietly writing many of the rules.

Discovering games like Vampire Killer is something that I live for as an enthusiast. It's one of the things that makes being a fan of video games so much fun.

Vampire Killer is a hidden treasure, and whenever I think about it, I'm reminded that there are many others like it. I'm reminded that there are so many other fascinating games and platforms that are just out there waiting to be discovered.

And I can't wait to hit the Internet and start digging for them!