The History of Castlevania: Bloodlines

Konami's Tokyo team, directed by Yutaka Haruki with scenario by Toshiki Yamamura, set out to build a Castlevania made specifically for the Genesis: faster and more action oriented than the Nintendo games, within an 8 megabit cartridge and the machine's color limits. Yamamura took inspiration from novelist Hideyuki Kikuchi and treated the game as the second act of a three part saga of his own, tying the series directly to Stoker's Dracula: Quincy Morris, who killed Dracula in the novel's 1897, is John's father.

The setting does the rest. For the first time the series leaves Dracula's castle and Romania behind: six stages run from the castle ruins through Athens, the leaning tower at Pisa, a German munitions factory, and Versailles, to a fictional castle in England, with the machine's effects pushed hard, reflections in water, a swaying tower, multi jointed bosses.

The music is a debut that changed the series. Michiru Yamane, already a Konami composer, scored her first Castlevania here, bringing the Bach she had studied at university to the series' rock themes and programming the music herself. She became its defining composer.

GamePro's 1997 retrospective kept the dissent honest: the graphics and sound were not the match of Super Castlevania IV, though the game was strong by Genesis standards. Famitsu recorded just 9,354 copies sold in Japan. GamesRadar later ranked it the 8th best Genesis game of all time, and Game Informer's Tim Turi, praising its gore relative to the series, called it one of the most overlooked treasures in the franchise.

Bloodlines is the bridge between the classic games and the handheld era. Its story continues directly in Portrait of Ruin (2006), where John's son Jonathan takes up the same whip in 1944 and Eric Lecarde returns as the ghost called Wind, and Yamane was asked to arrange one of her Bloodlines pieces for that game. The Stoker connection it built, a Belmont story told through the Morris family, became permanent series canon.