Castlevania Glory

Passions often have humble origins.

One of the best known works of fiction, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, can be traced to earlier influences from writers like Sheridan Le Fanu or John Polidori. Reviewers also focus on Stoker’s travel and research on Romanian folklore providing crucial inspiration for his great work. Yet much less well known is the debt that Dracula owes to a man by the name of James Rymer, whose own vampire fiction was published the year Stoker was born.¹ Literary reviews often argue that Stoker took many of his ideas from Rymer,² to whom much of the credit given to Stoker may really belong,³ as it was James Rymer who established the patterns and details of the modern vampire legend.⁴

For example, as the protagonists of Rymer’s story contemplate one of the vampire’s lovely victims, they fear that,

“there may be a possibility that she, with all her beauty, all her excellence and purity of mind, and all those virtues and qualities which should make her the beloved of all, and which do, indeed, attach all hearts towards her, should become one of that dreadful tribe of beings who cling to existence by feeding, in the most dreadful manner, upon the life blood of others—oh, it is too dreadful to contemplate! Too horrible—too horrible!"⁵

The idea played out in much the same way with Bram Stoker’s Lucy Westenra, and the sentiments expressed in Rymer’s work could very well have belonged to Stoker’s Van Helsing:

“Madness were easy to bear compared with truth like this. Oh, my friend, why, think you, did I go so far round, why take so long to tell you so simple a thing? Was it because I hate you and have hated you all my life? Was it because I wished to give you pain? …My friend, it was because I wished to be gentle in the breaking to you, for I know you have loved that so sweet lady.“

Naturally then we might ask, what was Rymer’s underappreciated novel, and why has his contribution been so easily forgotten? Is it because his work languished in obscurity? Is it because a fickle and undiscerning public failed to appreciate Rymer’s genius? Is it something else—some detail involving copyright, or censorship, or suppression?

But in fact it’s none of those things. In fact, people today gloss over Rymer’s work because it was a sprawling, maudlin, and occasionally incoherent penny dreadful:

Image from Wikipedia

Lest the cover fail to give it away, the length—over 600,000 words—should make clear that Varney the Vampire is not exactly the kind of fiction someone like Stoker would have wanted to admit as a precursor to Dracula. Where Dracula was suave and handsome,⁶ Varney’s eyes glittered like polished tin;⁷ where Dracula met his end after a desperate chase through the Carpathians, Varney perished in a volcano.⁸ And for the sake of Stoker’s reputation, I don’t want to claim Varney was in any way a necessary ingredient for the development of Dracula; there is easily room to doubt whether Stoker took anything at all from the penny dreadful. Still, it’s hard to avoid the idea that Varney provided an inspiration.

This is the way I feel about Castlevania

Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, video games were not easy to come by. After I bought my first Nintendo Entertainment System, it was some months before I owned anything other than Super Mario Brothers or Duck Hunt. But I’d visit friends with their own cartriges, and easily my favorite was Konami’s Castlevania, itself inspired by 1930’s films like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy. It was a lot of fun to play, and the music has been remixed more times than I can count.

Unfortunately, the graphics were terrible. While the art style of Castlevania I might be charitably described as “expressionist,” it would probably be more accurate to describe it as “garbage can.” Frankenstein’s monster was recognizable, but Dracula always looked like a man in a mask, and Igor was something like a cross between a monkey and a bald guy with a beard.

But I wasn’t really aware of this at the time. In fact, I wasn’t even aware of it when, seeking respite from my dreadful circumstances over the past year, I started hacking the game using tools like Stake and YY-CHR. After rearranging the level design and customizing some of the settings, I called my version Castlevania Glory, but after “finishing” it, I kept returning again and again to what had by then become a habitual escape from the unpleasant reality of my existence. It was only after months and months of tweaking and polishing the spites that I went back to the original game and realized with a kind of embarassed shock that the graphics of my favorite game growing up were so dreadful—and there was no excusing them on the limitations of the 8-bit hardware, because my own Castlevania Glory is emulated on the same hardware.

You’ll see what I mean just by looking at level 1.

Original on the left, Glory on the right

…and it’s the same in level 2:

Original on the left, Glory on the right

…and in level 3:

Original on the left, glory on the right

Partly I was able to see what worked for hacks like Overflow Darkness, Fan Edition, or Remix that tried for a sort of theme. Those are all examples of artistic hacks with something to say on a visual level, and they’re worth checking out to see how different they all feel. (I’ve beaten all three.)

While those hacks are very well done, I wasn’t inspired by them as much as the humble original, and as I went, I mostly just followed simple rules: Light sources should be brighter than everything else; the castle should be (more or less) structurally sound; blackness helps to provide a sense of three-dimensionality for unlit areas and alcoves; different areas should be visually distinct; the sky should darken and lighten to give a sense of the passage of time; and so on. Yet following those rules consistently, across the entire game, transformed it from a challenging platformer into an immersive experience that I find myself drawn back to again and again, and a game the older Apple Pie kids are proud to have beaten.

So while I can’t even pretend to hide the humble inspiraton for my efforts, the year-long process of playing, changing, playing and changing it so many times resulted in a final version that, I hope, breathes life into the original in a way that might make those of you who never played this game as children realize how it really felt to play Castlevania growing up in the 1980’s.

If you like old 8-bit video games, give it a shot.

Downloading and Installing Castlevania Glory

For those who’ve never played a hacked game before, you may find it a bit of a hassle. But if you persevere with these instructions, you’ll soon be vandalizing Dracula’s castle in the time honored tradition of vampire hunters the world over.⁹

Disclaimer: I am not endorsing any of the following websites or the content they provide. They may move the files you need after this is posted. They may innundate your screen with advertizements explicit enough to induce nausea, diarhea, or insanity. They may infest your hard drive with malware so nefarious it drains your bank account, ruins your credit rating, and subsequently detonates your computer. Even worse: They may just plain suck. Understand that you follow these links at your own risk.

A zipfile of the original Castlevania ROM can be found here, titled “Castlevania (USA)” (although I have no idea why you’d need to download it since you obviously already have the ROM on your hard drive from when you bought the game in 1986, right?).

Apple Pie’s glorious patch can be found here.

Utilities needed to apply the patch to the ROM can be found here for PC, and here for Mac.

Emulators needed to play the patched ROM can be found here for multiple operating systems. (Obviously Windows is better supported for gaming than other operating systems, which was pretty much the reason anybody ever used Windows ever since I was growing up.)

The storyline for Castlevania Glory can be found at this footnote.¹⁰

If you run into trouble, can’t manage the emulator, can’t get past level 3, or can’t understand why Simon Belmont doesn’t just dynamite Dracula’s castle into a smoking ruin, let me know in the comments and I’ll try my best to help out.

Good luck!

1. Gelder, K. (2002). Reading the vampire. Routledge.

2. Sutherland, D. V. (2016, October 26). Varney The Vampire: A Penny Dreadful Pioneer. WWAC. https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2016/10/varney-the-vampire-a-penny-dreadful-pioneer/

3. Twitchell, James B. (1981) The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

4. Dearinger, L. (2012). Playing Vampire Games: Rules and Play in Varney the Vampire and Dracula. Journal of Dracula Studies, 14(1), 4.

5. Rymer, J. M. (1847). Varney the Vampire, or: The Feast of Blood. Chapter XII.

6. But never mind the “hairs in the center of his palm”

7. Rymer, J. M. (1847). Varney the Vampire, or: The Feast of Blood. Chapter I.

8. Rymer, J. M. (1847). Varney the Vampire, or: The Feast of Blood. Chapter CCXX [sic].

9. Or at least, of vampire hunters in every land civilized enough to know the wonders of 8-bit Nintendo

10. It was only days before her wedding that Carmilla grew ill. In her delirium she moaned to Simon, her fiance, of the transformation she sensed was coming upon her. Not until that night did the village priest reveal to Simon that his beloved had been baptized in the unholy blood of Count Dracula, who must be destroyed before the sun rose on the third day lest Carmilla be lost to him forever.

At dawn on the second day, eager to reach the castle whilst the vampire slept, Simon paid a carriage driver to take him up the pass at dawn. Unbeknownst to him, the driver and his allies were Çingene under Dracula’s sway. Not until midmorning did Simon realize he had been travelling in the wrong direction! Fighting his way free, he escaped into the forests, where he struggled to avoid the Çingene as he made his way to his destination.

Now friendless, desperate, and hemmed in on all sides, Simon hurries at last toward the castle gates, where already the sun is setting…