This Week In Retro: Darkstalkers (Patreon)

July 1994: Teratophiles, rejoice!

by Diamond Feit

This might surprise anyone who looks at my enthusiasm for all things Resident Evil or peruses my Letterboxd reviews, but I never considered myself a horror fan. When the slasher genre exploded in the 1980s thanks to Friday the 13th, I found the image of Jason Voorhees too terrifying on the video store shelf to try and rent one of his films—or one from his competitors.

I started to branch out in the late 90s as a young adult, especially once Netflix made catching up on film history a breeze. It helped that slightly sillier pictures like From Dusk Till Dawn, Scream, and The Evil Dead series primed me to enjoy the spectacle and craft of horror films. I found myself appreciating the outrageous characters and special effects, enabling me to look past the fact that these flicks tortured and butchered people by the dozens.

Before I saw any of those movies, however, I was obsessed with fighting games. Street Fighter II spoke to me in ways few arcade games had, and once the genre exploded in the early 90s, I had my pick of one-on-one brawlers to sink my teeth into. Some of the arrivals in Street Fighter's wake leaned into violence and gore—Mortal Kombat and Time Killers come to mind—but I viewed their copious use of fake blood and guts as window dressing. Those games never frightened me; rather, their exaggerated presentation made me laugh.

In 1994, however, a new machine arrived in arcades that took my breath away. Though clearly modeled after the Street Fighter II formula, its roster consisted entirely of supernatural humanoids. In a genre that generally depicted regular people challenging each other mano-a-mano, Capcom's Darkstalkers embraced a classic horror aesthetic, answering a question no one asked: "What if we replaced our World Warriors with monsters?"

Darkstalkers, known simply as Vampire in Japan, presents itself as a by-the-numbers fighting game at first glance. The select screen features 10 potential candidates and a world map with each character assigned a national origin. In a one-player game, you must defeat every other fighter before facing off against a sub-boss and a final boss, both normally inaccessible. Two players can also compete against each other forever with the loser forced to insert another coin to continue.

However, the Darkstalkers lineup consists of nothing but legendary creatures from gothic literature, fairy tales, and general folklore. The core roster includes a vampire, a succubus, a mummy, a zombie, a Karlovian Frankenstein's monster, a werewolf, a sasquatch, a catgirl, a merman, and a ghostly samurai. Capcom's development team didn't always have such a global outlook in preparing this bestiary; producer Noritaka Funamizu told Gamest magazine in 1994 that "In the beginning, there were a lot of traditional Japanese monsters, but we trimmed that number down because we realized most international players wouldn’t be very familiar with them."

While Darkstalkers' gameplay mimics that of Street Fighter II by using the exact same control scheme as Capcom's already omnipresent hit, the inhuman nature of the combatants allows for wild variation in their movements. Unlike the shambling corpses seen in most zombie films, the nimble Lord Raptor can extend his bones through his rotting flesh and use them as bladed weapons. Likewise, the semi-aquatic Rikuo can mold his extremities into a hard shell or puff out spikes along his body like a blowfish.

Darkstalkers' wildest character, from both a gameplay and animation standpoint, is the massive mummy Anakaris. He can summon sarcophagi at will, dropping them from above as an attack or withdrawing into one for defense. Despite standing taller than anyone else in the game, Anakaris seemingly has no mass, as if his wrappings cover nothing at all. He has complete control over every individual piece of his linen as he defies gravity and basic physics; his punches and kicks can just as easily spring forth from the ground as they can his body.

Instead of relying on the usual narrative of a martial arts tournament—the backbone of so many fighting game franchises—Darkstalkers' mythical monsters challenge one another for domination. According to the game's various ending cinematics, whoever defeats all their opponents walks away with a newfound grasp of power and notoriety that transforms them. While each individual reaps different benefits from their victory, their success doesn't necessarily mean happiness for the human race. In this sense, the fiction of Darkstalkers reads like Mortal Kombat-lite; some characters seem happy to coexist with our society, while others seek to conquer it.

The game's motley bunch helped acclimate me to the world of Darkstalkers, for while I hadn't seen or read much horror by this stage of my life, I was at heart a lonely kid drawn towards outsiders. In other fighting games, I generally picked the weirdos or the obviously evil rather than the "normal" heroic characters. I first fell for Street Fighter II while maining Dhalsim, a man who can stretch his limbs and breathe fire, later switching to M. Bison who lights his entire body on fire as he attacks head-on like a torpedo.

With this experience, I approached Darkstalkers' squad of misfits like a malnourished beggar approaches an all-you-can-eat buffet. I remember initially choosing Bishamon, a samurai warrior wearing cursed armor with a snarling face on his chest. He controls a bit like Guile in Street Fighter II, relying on charge moves that require holding the joystick back before snapping forward and slashing with his sword. However, he also has an unusual aerial attack that summons a spirit to hold his opponent in place, effectively a long-range stun move that allowed me to rush forward and deal heavy damage.

I later dabbled with Demitri and Morrigan, as their skillsets closely resemble those of Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter II. Each has their own version of the famous hadōken "fireball" and shōryūken "dragon punch." Of course, their ethereal nature granted them techniques, such as Demitri's invincible dash or Morrigan's flying drill kick, which only work because they can momentarily phase through matter. Street Fighter II bent reality to dabble in fantasy but Darkstalkers insists you accept its magical moves as plausible.

As time passed I made a point of learning how to use every single contender; I couldn't tell you if I cleared the game with all of them, but I at least managed to play competitively with the entire cast. Call it a matter of good timing, for Darkstalkers debuted the summer after I graduated from high school. When I arrived at college in August, the campus game room had a cabinet waiting for me. I guarantee I spent more hours engrossed in the world of Darkstalkers than I did any lecture hall or even possibly my own dorm room.

It's not that I had lost interest in Street Fighter by 1994, it's just that the sheer selection of fighting games available to me had increased exponentially. That aforementioned game room made a point of stocking a full assortment of the latest examples of the genre; I dropped an incalculable number of coins into Primal Rage, Samurai Shodown II, X-Men: Children of the Atom, and eventually, Mortal Kombat 3 the following spring. Somewhere in this vast universe, there's a Diamond Feit who competed at Evo and xe were born right there in that campus arcade.

Yet as much time and money that I devoted to all these fine, upstanding machines, nothing captivated me quite like Darkstalkers. With 30 years of hindsight, I can only speculate what made Capcom's otherworldly crew appeal so much to me personally. The exquisite artwork certainly helped; even compared to the company's other releases, the characters in Darkstalkers have many more frames of animation, each gracefully moving and leaping and reacting with a fluidity I had never seen before.

I must also acknowledge that the cast of Darkstalkers has a particularly raw, sexual energy about them. Plenty of fighting games feature physically-fit bodies with exposed flesh, but I find that, like many classic horror movies, an unspoken air of eroticism permeates Darkstalkers in particular. Demitri's formal attire looks like body paint; you can see the outline of his every muscle. Talbain might be half-wolf but the man still has broad shoulders and shredded abs under all that fur. I don't know that anyone publicly contemplated Rikuo's pulchritude back in 1994 but in a post Shape of Water world, I'm positive plenty of people out there would take one look at his fins and say "Now hear me out…"

I'm burying the lede here, but Darkstalkers' two leading ladies proved so popular with fans that artists and cosplayers continue to worship at the altar of Morrigan and Felicia three decades later. Capcom hasn't made an original Darkstalkers game in over 25 years at this point but the company continues to pump out merchandise featuring loving depictions of these two women who apparently don't believe in underwear.

Therein lies the rub: Capcom's incredibly talented staff of artists and designers created an original property that spawned multiple sequels packed to the gills with colorful, memorable characters. Yet in 2024, we're no closer to a new Darkstalkers game than we are, say, a new Trojan or SonSon or any other long-forgotten Capcom franchise. Instead we get periodic rereleases and novelty costumes featured in other, more profitable games, all to remind us that Darkstalkers exists as if I haven't spent decades waiting for a proper sequel.

Sadly, "profitable" seems to nail down precisely why Capcom won't resurrect Darkstalkers. Drawing thousands of frames of animation requires many hours of labor, and compensating all those people for their time requires millions—perhaps billions—of yen. All the fans like me who remember and adore these classic arcade experiences represent an unfortunate minority of Capcom's target demographic. Part of growing older is learning to accept that the stuff I love from my past just doesn't appeal to enough people to warrant the necessary monetary investment to create more of said stuff.

Theoretically, if Street Fighter managed to return to a warm reception using three-dimensional graphics, we just might see a 3D Darkstalkers revival one day. A scant few members from the cast did appear in the more recent Marvel vs Capcom releases in polygonal form; they look fine, certainly on par with their fellow fighters, but the nature of their rigid models means that the 3D games omit their more extreme poses and animations.

There's also the larger issue of the genre expanding over the decades to the point that any game can apparently include any character, no matter their origins. Post Street Fighter II, the series has welcomed towering giants, magic-wielders, god-like beings, and numerous artificial lifeforms into the fold. If Street Fighter 6 revealed an extra-terrestrial made of living fire in the next season pass, would anyone bat an eye?

In 30 years, a video game about sexy monsters has gone from ahead of its time to shockingly commonplace. Besides the scores of independent artists and developers who have diligently sought to fulfill peoples' desires to see amorous creatures of the night, even major corporations now recognize the size of the horny demographic. Unfortunately, given the rising costs of producing and publishing video games, Capcom makes do with sales of figurines and wall-scrolls rather than take a risk on funding a brand new game in a crowded marketplace.

As for me, the respectful Darkstalkers admirer who's more interested in super combos than thirst traps, I must face the fact that the series has no place in our current gaming landscape. At the very least, I can find solace in knowing that I'm not alone in my love for these characters, even if that means feeling a sting of disappointment every time Capcom tries to cash in on my nostalgia.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.