Overview
What is Dracula Hunter?
Dracula Hunter was an arcade game released in 1979/80 by Japanese firm Teknon Kogyo. The company disappeared soon afterwards, with the only other game released by them being a bog-standard Space Invaders clone. Famously among collectors and retro enthusiasts the arcade version is currently unemulated, and while at least one arcade board is known to exist, the owner(s) have not as yet been willing to rip the ROMs and allow the board to be studied so it can be added to MAME.
A few gameplay videos exist on Youtube which presumably were recorded directly from one of these rare boards. Somehow the game did make it into some UK arcades at the time as a number of people on various forums remember playing it, plus all the videos show the English 'Dracula' logo versus a Japanese logo in some screenshots.
So what's this then?
This is a recreation of the game for PC, Mac, Linux and webGL written in Unity, based solely on studying the available footage. The graphics were also drawn from scratch and are as close as they can be, given the blurry/grainy quality of the Youtube videos and screenshots which makes picking out individual pixels tricky, while the sound was grabbed from the videos.
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!
Why not make it for era-appropriate hardware and run it in MAME?
Although I have written games for Pacman hardware in the past and have basic toolchains already setup for other machines such as Galaga and Bomb Jack, while studying the game it became apparent that despite its obscurity, it's actually a very advanced board for the time period and I don't think there are any suitable surrogates that could handle this game comfortably without a massive amount of work.
While at first glance it would appear to be a simple tile-based game, on closer inspection it looks like it's some sort of full colour bitmap setup. This is very apparent on the blood dripping animation that happens if you clear the bonus bat stage, which moves smoothly down the screen with drips scaling in the Y axis, very tricky to pull off with tiles and would surely require the ability to create dynamic tile data in RAM, which was very expensive in 1979. There's also a very detailed title screen which would have taken up most of the tileset in a traditional 256 or 512 tile ROM.
I've also recreated as far as possible where objects have a black border and draw over each other, probably because there wasn't enough CPU time to mask up to 21 enemies with all the pixels underneath, but it seems when there was CPU time they did do just that, for example when the black bat flies on the screen full of blood.
Perhaps something like Defender hardware could do manage this game, but there would be the problem of that being a horizontal game and having to get the MAME team to amend their driver. Recreating the sound effects would also be a challenge. Maybe I will look into it further if there is a positive response to this version.
How to play
The aim of the game is to protect the princess from the hoards of vampires and bats. You can throw a cross to kill them, which is quite unique in acting like a boomerang. To complete a level you can either kill all the vampires, or shoot into the blue castle door when it opens briefly. But watch out because every other time a bat will fly out of the castle and if it lines up horizontally will dive at you at breakneck speed. Or as The Fragnostic put it in his video, 'those bats, man, they barrel out of that f--king house like they accidentally flew into a pitching machine'.
When you complete a level the castle explodes and a bonus is awarded (more on that below). On the screen are also 3 or 4 'girls', who move from side to side and the vampires will feed on if they catch them. Once a vampire has drank their blood, it changes colour and hunts down the player at high speed.
If the vampires reach the princess they will attempt to break through the barriers protecting her. Diving bats can also break the barriers. If an enemy reaches the princess, it's not just a life lost - it's instant GAME OVER!
As levels progress there are more vampires released at the start of each level and they will more aggressively pursue both the princess and the player. Every 7 levels you get the opportunity to score some big bonuses by taking on a level full of bats rather than vampires. Complete four of these bonus stages and the game essentially declares itself beaten by flashing up the message, 'NO MORE'!
Scoring
From the Youtube videos it seems most of the scoring is achieved through killing bats and in particular end-of-level bonuses. Shooting a bat nets a 'mystery' bonus between 50 and 500, while the end of level bonus is a genuine mystery, there seems to be no rhyme or reason why low or high bonuses are awarded in the footage.
As I couldn't find any kind of pattern to the amounts awarded I took the executive decision to base the bonus on a number of factors: Current level, time taken, girls still alive, barriers lost, style points for tricky boomerang shots plus a random element.
As per the gameplay extra lives are awarded at 2,000 and 80,000 points.
Conclusion
So while it's not the best game ever, it does have some interesting ideas and technically is very advanced for 1979 with a number of different mechanics, and it seems a shame that the real thing is seemingly lost for good. It was a lot of fun recreating it in Unity and took a couple of weeks, which I think confirms there is quite a lot going on compared to its peers as I reckon creating a perfect clone of Space Invaders or Pacman in Unity wouldn't take more than a weekend.
Hopefully some of you will enjoy playing or at least appreciate its technical merits compared to other games from the period and how a real working arcade board would be a great find for the retro community. I'd love to hear from anyone who remembers playing or seeing the game and maybe has some feedback on how my version plays compared with your memories that I may be able to factor into future updates.
