#23: Castlevania

Released In: 1987
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami

      You're Simon Belmont. You carry around a big whip. One night, you randomly show up at Dracula's castle and decide to make all his sick masochistic fantasies come true. That, or you're there to kill him and free Transylvania from his evil grip. Either way, you're going to have to fight your way through hundreds of evil monster, including spastic hunchbacks, giant bats, Medusa heads, bloody skeletons, Frankenstein, fishmen, dinosaur skeletons, and the Grim Reaper.

Syd Lexia: This was one of the first NES games that I owned and it was the very first NES game I ever played on my brand new NES. Oh sure, I could have played the Mario/Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet cart that came with the system, but I had already played all those games. So instead I opted for Castlevania which had been bought for us as an additional game. From the moment I accidentally found the hidden pork chops in the first level, I was hooked.

DarkMaze: Oh, Castlevania, you gothic Metroid, you. I was actually never really into Castlevania as a kid, probably because I tried to start with the third one and I could never get past the first boss.

I rediscovered the series some years later and was shocked to see what I had missed. I’m a complete sucker for atmosphere, and the original game has it in droves with fantastic music, a spooky look, and excellent gameplay. And the best part was that it featured all the coolest classic monsters: Frankenstein, The Mummy, Medusa, Death (taking a break from pestering the paper boy), and of course Drac himself. Fantastic!

Oh, and the bat. I love that guy.

I’m not telling you anything you probably don’t already know, of course. But what I’m trying to say is that it was as if all those old Universal horror movies were as cool as I always wanted them to be, and then they all got mashed together and made playable.

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