9 Indie Video Games That SAVED Doomed Franchises
3. Castlevania Became Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night
Castlevania is one of the best selling franchises in gaming history, being the inspiration and namesake for half the Metroid-vania genre of games. Originally released in in 1986 it consisted of a member of the Belmont clan using a magical whip to kill zombies, monsters, and eventually Dracula, himself.
The Castlevania series has had several fantastic entries in its history, not to mention one of the few cases of a video game series being converted into a different media form to such wide acclaim and quality as the animated Castlevania series. But the last actual Castlevania game was in 2009 , which was really just a remake of the '89 Gameboy entry, Adventure. The spin-off series Lord of Shadows last produced a game in 2014.
Igarashi Koji, the developer behind Castlevania, left Konami in 2014 and in 2018 managed to release his crowd-funded spiritual successor - Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon to similar wide acclaim as the original Castlevania games he had made. This set him up to produce the fuller sequel, Ritual of the Night.
Igarashi got the idea to crowdfund Bloodstained from watching MegaMan creator Inafune Keiji's attempt at making Mighty No. 9. It's kind of interesting then, that Igarashi managed to succeed with Bloodstained where Inafune ultimately failed.