Castlevania is one of the most popular franchise in video game history. Since the original game in the franchise saw a release on the original Nintendo back in 1986, it quickly became a staple of video games in the 80s and throughout the 90s. However, by the end of the 90s and the franchise transitioning from a 2D side-scroller to 3D, it had a huge effect on the franchise and not in the most positive way. While many know about Castlevania 64 and Legacy of Darkness on the Nintendo 64, there was also a game that was in development for the Sega Dreamcast called Castlevania Resurrection.
Sadly, very little is known about the project. It’s speculated that some of the environments in the 2005 game Castlevania: Curse of Darkness were originally in Resurrection, but it’s unknown in part due to nobody coming forward and no prototype ever released to the public. The only person to come forward to release anything is Greg Orduyan who worked as the Art Director for the game. In an interview with Castlevania Dungeon back in 2007, Orduyan did reveal that this would have been the first game in the franchise to be developed by Konami’s American studio. The game would have featured time travel elements and focused on Sonia Belmont and Victor Belmont. Victor would have been sucked into Sonia’s world where they would have to take care of Dracula once again.
The project also was cancelled very late into development. Orduyan said that most of the game was done and it was really just a matter of tweaking and balancing. With the announcement of the Playstation 2 release date, all development was effected within Konami including projects in both America and Japan. This led to Konami being very trigger happy and canceling the game outright. This led to the project being scrapped and Castlevania would not see a console release until Castlevania: Lament of Innocence in late 2003 on the Playstation 2.
When asked why the Resurrection wasn’t just ported over to the Playstation 2, Orduyan stated:
This goes to the intricacies of game development. If you want to port something, you need to plan it early in development. Otherwise, you would need to rewrite it. Sometimes it’s easier to build from scratch than to retrofit. But we recycled some of the team members to work on the Japanese games.
Unseen64 have archived the intro to the game which you can view down below:
