With the unprecedented success of the Street Fighter II series, Capcom sought out to make more fighting games. Darkstalkers, or as it’s known in Japan — Vampire — was originally envisioned to be a fighting game with the Universal Horror Monsters. But because Capcom could not get the license to the characters, they had their art teams create some horrors of their own. And thus a unique corner of Capcom’s fighting game legacy was born!

The game’s roster was designed by Akira “Akiman” Yasuda, famous for his work on Final Fight and Street Fighter II with some input from Alex Jimenez, a producer at Capcom USA. The final art for the first game was mostly drawn by Capcom illustrator Bengus (he did the character portraits for Marvel vs. Capcom 2) The characters were not afraid to be cute, provocative and sexy. Two characters from the games: Morrigan and Felicia are infamous for their outfits… or lack thereof.

With similar inputs, a 6 button attack system, EX attacks (a staple of Street Fighter III and IV), super combos and an overall similar interface, the games were very similar to Street Fighter II but they had their own innovations such as being the first Capcom games to utilize airblocking. The Darkstalkers games also solidified the “magic series“ of inputs that would be followed through in the Marvel vs Capcom games. Darkstalkers also emphasized understanding a character’s command normals and how the properties of a character’s normal attack can change depending on the distance between you and your opponent.

Besides that, the series is known for its beautiful sprite art, fluid animations and goofy sense of humor; the games never go full swing in the horror concept. Victor, the Frankenstein’s Monsters pastiche has an attack where he pounds you with his butt, and one of Lord Raptor’s finishing moves turns his foe into a basketball for a slam dunk!

Darkstalkers 1 and the second game Night Warriors: Darkstalkers Revenge are very similar, Night Warriors is essentially the first game with more characters and slightly remixed music. Vampire Savior - Lord of Vampire or Darkstalkers 3 for shorthand introduced the characters of Jedah, Queen Bee and Lillith, Morrigan’s sister and also introduced a new round system similar to Killer Instinct; a character’s position is reset rather than their life bar when a player gets knocked out. Vampire Savior would be revised several times throughout the years.

Not counting updated versions, Capcom hasn’t produced an original Darkstalkers game since 1997. I’m under the impression that Capcom wanted the games to do better than they ultimately did. There was a cartoon show and some anime produced for crying out loud. I assume they wanted it to be the merchandising juggernaut that Street Fighter was. But this never really panned out.

Capcom still has a soft spot for the series, obviously. The characters have made countless cameos and guest fighter appearances like in Namco x Capcom, the Marvel vs Capcom games, Project X Zone, Puzzle Fighter II, and others. They haven’t had their own games in years, but they’ve been mingling with other Capcom characters for about 20 years now.

Yoshinori Ono, the current producer for the Street Fighter games has suggested for years that he’d like to see the characters come back, but this has been yet to be seen.

You can play the Arcade ROMS on a Japanese PS2 via Vampire: Darkstalkers Collection, or if you’re a 360/PS3 owner, play Darkstalkers 2 and 3 off of Darkstalkers Ressurection.

(Myself and my friend Tony made a video about the series a few years ago…)