A developer named Arlasoft has just announced it has recreated the "lost" 1979 arcade game Dracula Hunter from the Japanese developer Teknon Kogyo, for modern PCs.
If you haven't heard of Dracula Hunter before, we certainly won't blame you, as we hadn't heard of its ourselves up until a few days ago. Nevertheless, that hasn't stopped us from being excited to give this new recreation a try or being impressed at Arlasoft for trying to bring this obscure piece of arcade history to the attention of more players.
As the Lost Media Wiki states, Dracula Hunter is a title that originally landed in Japanese arcades back in the late 1970s, and sees players defending a princess (depicted at the bottom of the screen) from hordes of vampires and bats. It was famously referenced in the Japanese manga Game Center Arashi — a story about a young boy obsessed with becoming the greatest arcade gamer alive — and also apparently saw an UK release, with several online forums featuring accounts from players old enough to have experienced the title first-hand.
However, in more recent years, it has gone on to be widely referred to as a piece of "lost" or endangered media, with the only surviving machines being in the hands of private collectors who have previously shared videos and screenshots, but have so far been reluctant to dump the ROMs publicly or allow the board to be added to MAME.
It's because of this that Arlasoft recently set out to study the available footage online to see whether they could try and recreate a version of it for PC, Mac, Linux and webGL, in Unity, in the hopes of one day being able to provide a playable solution for those interested in the game to check out.
The graphics for the recreation were apparently drawn from scratch and are "as close as they can be", Arlasoft states, based on the blurry/grainy footage of the YouTube videos and screenshots".
Meanwhile, the sound itself is grabbed directly from the pre-existing videos.
Writing about the project on itch.io, Arlasoft states, "It's been on my radar for a while as being a unique and realistic opportunity to rescue a 'lost' game and I had drawn some of the sprites a while ago, but I was motivated to press ahead with the project by a member of the Mamemeister discord community who has mentioned many times that he remembers the game fondly from the early 1980s and would love to play it again. Well, here you go, Steve!"
You can grab the game here. It's also available to play in-browser.