One new mysteries music video (h / t Polygon), a player outside the room navigates through what appears to be a prototype Castlevania: The Resurrection, a Sega Dreamcast game canceled in the early 2000s. If legitimate, this is the first time the game materials have been made available to the public.
The short video appeared on a newly created YouTube channel and has no description. The disc is marked “11 ‘5 ’99” and looks like a typical Sega rewriting typographic GD-ROM commonly used internally for development and distributed to the press in the Dreamcast era. It’s not clear where the person in the video got the disc from.
The player loads several areas from a debug menu, but moves the character with only one hand, so it’s not clear if fights or other features are implemented. And, while the main character suffers damage from several enemies, she also goes through a lava pit, without having an obvious bad effect, suggesting that much remains unfinished.
Conformable Unseen64, Castlevania: The Resurrection would have followed The legends of Castlevania the protagonist Sonia Belmont and a new character named Victor Belmont while traveling in the past to deal with Dracula before the events of the first game. While the game appeared during a private show at E3 1999 and in September 1999 issue of the United Kingdom Dreamcast Magazine, Konami quietly canceled it in March 2000.
“Castlevania: The Resurrection it was a doomed game from the beginning “, former Konami artist Jason Lee Elliott write on his personal website. “The team itself had a lot of problems when we came on board. Most team members only ever worked on sports games, so they had no idea how to make a 3D action platformer. The art team was not very cohesive and could not agree with one direction. The game has been in development for almost two years and has had little to show for it. ”
Since its cancellation, various Castlevania: The Resurrection the assets appeared online – inclusive conceptual art and the music—Thanks to those who contributed to the development of the game.
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I don’t think the world lost anything amazing when Konami sent Castlevania: The Resurrection to pasture, but that doesn’t mean that archiving efforts like these aren’t yet of vital importance to preserving the history of video games. We lose much more than a few hours of play when a major studio cancels a project. Thanks to the fans who keep looking for information; Only through their efforts do we continue to learn about these games.