The recently discovered Castlevania: Resurrection prototype is now available online, mere weeks after the lost, cancelled game resurfaced.
Comby Laurent, owner of the site that acquired the game, so now the Castlevania: Resurrection prototype is now available online. This is the first time the game has been playable since its original debut way back at E3 1999.
Castlevania: Resurrection was developed in-house by Konami and was described as a reboot of the series, focusing on Sonia Belmont and a new character – Victor Belmont.
The now-available demo, which is a pre-E3 demo, features five environments and a boss fight that corresponds to a later stage in the game. As the game is 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 apparently not loading properly.
Castlevania: Resurrection was set in 1666, and was planned to be the seventeenth game in the franchise, taking place just prior to original series’ protagonist Simon Belmont in the original Castlevania. The cancellation reportedly happened from various things according to art director Greg Orduyan like disagreements between the Japanese and American teams, and the Dreamcast’ short life.
Castlevania: Resurrection was supposed to follow Sonia Belmont, the series’ first female protagonist, who previously appeared in Castlevania Legends for the Nintendo Game Boy. Sonia’s games were later removed from the official canon, however, as both her existence and Castlevania Legends conflicted with the main games in the series.
The newcomer Victor Belmont was supposed to be an 1800s-era vampire hunter that forsook his lineage, only to run away from his homeland in fear of his destiny as a vampire hunter. The main antagonist in the game was supposed to be a female vampire of some kind, and not Dracula.
Victor Belmont eventually appeared later in the series in the western-made Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, where he makes a claim to be the descendant of Gabriel Belmont, the protagonist of that sub-series. While their connection is unknown, he also claimed to be the last descendent of the Belmont lineage.
