A Castlevania: Resurrection prototype was discovered after two decades, a French fan-run Sega Dreamcast preservation site has found.
The Castlevania: Resurrection prototype was detailed over on the Sega Dreamcast Info Preservation Games site, the first time we’ve seen the game since it was originally shown back at E3 1999.
The game was developed in-house by Konami and was likened to be a reboot of the series, focusing on Sonia Belmont and a new character – Victor Belmont.
Here’s some footage of the long-lost prototype:
The prototype demo, which is a pre-E3 demo, reportedly features five environments and a boss fight that corresponds to a stage in the game. As the game is clearly in a beta build, most of the areas are not connected with each other, but they are accessible from the start menu, with one of them not loading, apparently.
Set in 1666, Castlevania: Resurrection was set to be the seventeenth game in the franchise, and taking place just prior to original series’ protagonist Simon Belmont in the original Castlevania. The cancellation was reportedly due to a number of things according to art director Greg Orduyan like disagreements between the Japanese and American teams, and the Dreamcast’ short-lived life.
Castlevania: Resurrection would have followed Sonia Belmont, the series’ first female protagonist, who previously appeared in Castlevania Legends for the Nintendo Game Boy. Sonia’s games were removed from the official canon, however, as her existence and Castlevania Legends conflicted with the main games – so it remains to be seen what they were planning in Castlevania: Resurrection.
The new character, Victor Belmont, was supposed to be an 1800s-era vampire hunter that abandoned his lineage, only to run away from the region in fear of his destiny as a vampire hunter. Reportedly, the main antagonist in the game would be a female vampire of some kind, and not Dracula.
Victor Belmont eventually made an appearance later in the series, in the western-developed Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, where he claims to be a descendant of Gabriel Belmont, the protagonist of that sub-series. While their familial relation is unknown, he also claimed to be the last descendent of the Belmont lineage.
