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In 1993, I was far too young to even hope to see Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I still somehow cleared the bar to play copious amounts of its graphically ambitious yet barely coherent T-rated Sega CD video game adaptation.
Where other kids that I knew were desperate to see as many scary and gory movies as they could get their hands on, I didn’t have so much as an inkling. I was never really into the genre. I even preferred to walk quickly past the horror section in my local video store because I thought the boxes looked strange and frightening. I knew my parents wouldn’t go for those movies if I pitched them, and that was totally fine with me. I’ve developed more of a taste for horror movies as an adult, but they’ve never been my go-to. If I remember right, I think that my parents went to see the oscar-winning Dracula film in theaters while I stayed home with a sitter.
As such a horror-disinterested kid, I wouldn’t normally have wanted to play a weird official video game based on a movie I had no desire to see…but the Dracula game spoke to several of my other geek interests. You see, I’ve always been a sucker for licensed movie games, and in the early nineties, gaming and Hollywood worked together in some uniquely amazing and ridiculous ways. The extra storage space of CD-ROM media allowed for excessive and stupid uses of live action video files, often rendered in grainy quality, poor framerates, and very low color depth. Game studios scrambled to try and make games by marrying these low quality videos with simple gameplay, sacrificing any meaningful depth for piles of visual flash. Nearly all of the games that used this tech turned out badly, but I loved them all the same.
On most gaming systems of the day, Bram Stoker’s Dracula got turned into a bog-standard platforming adventure. This was the typical route for movie adaptations no matter the genre — just put a guy on screen and have him run around and jump, and you’re good. For reasons we may never truly know, the development team at Psygnosis wasn’t content to just port one of these simple Dracula platform games over to the shiny new Sega CD console with better music, as was so often the custom…
