Game Changer Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge - Where My Love For Konami's Legendary Series Began

A couple of years ago, I penned a feature for this very site which explored the idea that playing video games – like any other formative memory – can be linked to physical locations.

For example, you might fondly remember a certain town because it's where you bought a favourite game; that's happened to me many times in my life. In the case of Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge, this memory is even more potent because the game also represented my first exposure to a series which is now my all-time favourite in the pantheon of interactive entertainment.

There may be some of you reading this who seriously question how any 46-year-old Castlevania fan can have failed to kick off their obsession with the franchise with anything other than the NES trilogy, but I'm from the United Kingdom, and Nintendo's 8-bit console didn't enjoy the same success here as it did elsewhere in the world.

As a result, I personally knew only one person who owned an NES; I played on it just the once, and the only game he had in his collection was Super Mario Bros. – so I effectively missed out on Castlevania, Simon's Quest and Dracula's Curse, at least at the time of their original releases.

Like so many UK gamers, I was a Sega fan through and through, thanks to the arrival of my Mega Drive in 1990. While I owned a Game & Watch during the '80s, the first true Nintendo system I owned was the Game Boy, which I received in 1991.

Close to where I used to live as a child, there's a town called Market Bosworth – world famous thanks to the fact that in 1485, it witnessed the change of English history when King Richard III fell to the forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. As an aside, Richard's remains – assumed lost for centuries – were found underneath a Leicester car park in 2012.

Market Bosworth (a stone's throw from Rare's old and new offices in Twycross, fact fans) was once home to a tiny independent video game store called Medlantic Hi Tech. I say "store", but in reality it traded from a small, slightly damp shed in the back garden of a sleepy-looking cottage.

My dad, who owned a chain of video rental stores at the time and was branching out into stocking video games, visited Medlantic Hi Tech regularly because he had struck up some kind of business deal with the owner.

As a result, I ended up picking up quite a few classic games from this store, including Streets of Rage and Midnight Resistance on the Mega Drive. I also bought Belmont's Revenge from this establishment, which I took a chance on after reading a glowing 91% review in Mean Machines magazine.

I can still recall sitting in the car in Market Bosworth's tiny, quaint marketplace while my parents finished shopping, gazing at the cover and leafing through the instructions. Nothing could have prepared me for the moment I loaded it into my Game Boy when I got home; not only did the game live up to its promise with tight, compelling gameplay, but it also featured one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard on Nintendo's handheld.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I forced friends and family to listen to Hidehiro Funauchi's awesome music over and over and over, and I even purchased the bulky Nuby Game Boy Amplifier, which bolted into the bottom of the handheld and boosted its audio, all so everyone could appreciate the likes of Praying Hands and New Messiah at a more agreeable (and perhaps annoying) volume.

Having skipped Castlevania: The Adventure entirely, I simply assumed that the entire series was up to the standard of Belmont's Revenge – so when I happened to stay over at a friend's house soon afterwards, I was intrigued to discover that he owned a copy of Super Castlevania IV.

Expecting something similar to the Game Boy offering, I was utterly blown away by the SNES title – and this set in motion a lifelong adoration for the series which remains undimmed almost 35 years later. The Game Boy would get another Castlevania entry later in its life; Castlevania Legends came after the arrival of the seminal Symphony of the Night, but it was a crushing disappointment to discover it was totally inferior to its predecessor, which was seven years old in 1998 (which is when Legends launched in the West).

This week saw the release of a demo for Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, the first new entry in the franchise for over a decade. This short taster has certainly piqued my interest in the full game, and I love the fact that the title references the Game Boy release I love so fondly.

I'll be sinking my teeth into Belmont's Curse when it launches later this month, but I'm also going to make time for the Game Boy title that started my connection with Konami's vampire-slaying series.