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…
