"As long as I was able to make Castlevania games, it was fun," Koji Igarashi says of his time at Konami. "But then, I wasn't."
There was never a game creator so in love with the mythology of his own series as Igarashi. As the producer of the gothic action-adventure series that has spanned nearly every gaming platform since the 8-bit NES, Igarashi didn't just make Castlevania, he lived it. He'd show up at E3 Expo brandishing a fedora and a whip, looking like one of the vampire hunters (if not Dracula himself) from his games .
It couldn't have felt good to be shoved to the side. Castlevania fans who enjoyed Igarashi's style were perplexed to find the series had been handed over to Metal Gear Solid producer Hideo Kojima, with development outsourced to Spain. Igarashi, seeing Konami quickly shifting its focus to mobile games, moved over to that side. After years there, he didn't release a single game.
Konami had left Igarashi behind, but it would take some doing before he could muster the courage to leave. "As soon as I graduated from college, I went straight into Konami. I'd never left Konami," Igarashi, 47, says. "So that's kind of a scary thing when you haven't done something like that before."
He soon saw a ray of hope. Keiji Inafune, the producer of Mega Man---another long-running series similarly neglected by its publisher---had quit Capcom and launched a Kickstarter to fund a spiritual successor to the series. "A Japanese creator could go out on his own, could be independent, and could successfully launch a new IP with the support of his fan base," Igarashi said. "And of gamers, especially in the West, that still appreciated those sort of experiences."
So today, Igarashi is launching his Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night---essentially a classic Igarashi-style Castlevania without all of Konami's trademarks getting in the way. It's to be released for personal computers, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
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