Vampires, werewolves, zombies and other things that go bump in the night have been popular characters in many different forms of media for centuries. A video game franchise that debuted 25 years ago took a campy twist on these classic monsters – Darkstalkers. The fighting game first arrived in arcades in the summer of 1994 and put its own unique stamp on the genre.
Darkstalkers (known in Japan as just Vampire), according to producer Alex Jiminez, was originally planned to be a Universal Monsters fighting game, but was changed to feature original characters after Universal rejected the idea and refused to license the characters. (However, according to art director Akira Yasuda, one of his colleagues thought of a monster fighting game and the characters were designed from there, with no inspiration from Universal whatsoever.)
The focus of much of the game’s development was spent on making the characters as interesting as possible, as the development team believed that in other fighters, players didn’t care much about the characters beyond what they did in a match. The design team accordingly tried to give the characters in Darkstalkers as much individuality as possible, and writing a story that featured a much darker tone. The story itself is based on the invasion of Earth by a powerful alien, Pyron, who wants to devour the planet. The most fearsome monsters on Earth band together to defend the planet.
The game was well received in arcades, though the home console ports saw more mixed reception. The spooky soundtrack mixed with the high-saturation graphics gave the game a unique feel unlike many other arcade fighters of the time. Darkstalkers not only saw several sequels, but characters such as Morrigan have gone on to appear in some of Capcom’s crossover titles (such as Marvel vs. Capcom). Darkstalkers has also proved to be a fairly significant multimedia franchise for Capcom, with the game spurring an anime series, an American-made cartoon series, comic books, novels, and much more. Though the most recent game released in 2013, it seems that Capcom hasn’t totally lost interest in their monster mashup quite yet.
