Rearticulating the Dead
Video game database MobyGames offers that there are at least 280 titles that feature “Vampire” as a theme. 84 of these titles contain “Count Dracula” and 48 have a vampire protagonist. None of those video games listed include titles where a vampire has been used as a generic figure within the diegesis, of which there are many more. In his list of tenets outlining the vampire movie monster, Jeffrey Weinstock offers that “The vampire film genre does not exist”, with vampires being “defined by generic hybridity” and that they are “inevitably intertextual” (Weinstock 2012, 16). One can also apply this observation to all categories used to define the vampire video game genre. Few of the games that contain vampires use them as a central organising principle, with the entire range of their prior incarnations, from the fields of folkloric, literary, and cinematic vampires, being recontextualised and appropriated to whichever video game genre they are required to fit as they serve different functions depending on the narrative and ludic parameters of the title that summons them. Vampires are reshaped within first-person games with original narratives, such as Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi (2003), third-person adaptations of Hollywood films like Van Helsing (2004), and side-on indie platformers, including Lesbian Vampire Simulator (2020). They lurk in 2D hidden object puzzle games such as Vampire Legends: The True Story of Kisilova (2015) and 3D point-and-click games like Dracula: Resurrection (1999). Vampires amass in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), dominated by World of Warcraft (2004), action Role-Playing games (RPGs) such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), and free-to-play card games, including Hearthstone (2014). Vampires can be fought within the Western genre game Evil West (2022), seen fighting Nazis in BloodRayne (2002), or cordially invited into the domestic space in social simulation game, The Sims 4: Vampires (2017). Moving beyond the boundaries of their corporeal forms, vampires can be spells used in Diablo III (2012), weapons wielded in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), and even planes flown in Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (2019).
The video game vampire would appear to be thriving, but their presence is also like a diffuse mist; their symbolic potential, which is unique to the vampiric identity in other cultural forms, is often reduced to minimalist signifiers such as fangs and a thirst for blood within many of their video game representations. Paul Barber explains that the folkloric “vampire’s activities are not consistent because they are mostly ‘scapegoat’ explanations” (Barber 2010, 87). In a survey of Nosferatu in video games, Carl Wilson observed that video game vampires have “been dispersed among texts that make them cute jokes [and] turned into generic cannon-fodder”. Furthermore, “they find themselves shifted into non-horror genres or boiled-down to a single image or word without context” (Wilson 2023a, XXX). Video-game vampires, as a broader species, are also subservient “scapegoats” in this regard.
Barber further notes that, visually, “The fictional vampire tends to be tall, thin, and sallow, the folkloric vampire is plump and ruddy or dark in color”. As for their heritage and environment, “the fictional vampire tends to spring from the nobility and to live in a castle, while the folkloric vampire is of peasant stock and resides in […] the graveyard in which he was buried” (Barber 2010, 4). Yet, video game vampires, more so than cinematic vampires, cover both of these descriptions and beyond, in a vast plurality of combinations, and often within the same text. For example, in the Darkstalkers (Vampire in Japan) fighting game series (1994-), the lead male figure is Demitri Maximoff, a Romanian, brooding vampire lord in the Dracula mould, but in being shaped by the genre he is within, he also possesses the extraordinary musculature of Superman. There is also the female fighter Hsien-Ko, who is based on the jiāngshī (hopping) vampires of Chinese folklore, and Jedah Dohma, a 6000-year-old demon noble with wings, who wears a high-collared, monotoned, buttoned down jacket in the style of Count Orlock of Nosferatu (1922). Except, Dohma was actually “conceived as an amalgam of Death and a Japanese schoolboy” (Goulter 2012), so his gothic jacket is not adapted from the film Nosferatu, but from that of a Japanese school uniform. While his supernatural motifs may appear to overlap, Dohma is not a vampire. With the Darkstalkers series being developed in Japan, this design may be obvious to culturally competent players, but less so to others without the cultural capital and context (Picard 2009, 95). As with all video game vampires, the connections that define the borders between fictional and folkloric, and fantasy and modern vampires, are constantly open to a process of intertextual negotiation as they transition into a new media form, open to cultural (mis/re)interpretation by both the producers of the text and those that consume them.
Ken Gelder refers to modern “vampire blockbusters” as being at a point of “exhaustion”, but that some titles are “nonetheless able to mobilise (or energise) involvement, even belief, in what it does” (Gelder 1996, 142). Vampire video games also have the capacity to come within both points of this rubric. Still, the overlapping of myths, forms, and design intent does not by default leave the video game vampire exhausted, but the ways in which vampires are expressed has shifted and the significance that they possess has to be rearticulated in order to be meaningful. To echo Stacey Abbott, who states that the celluloid vampire “is shaped by both the changing world into which it emerges as well as by the medium through which it is represented”, the same must be said for the video game vampire (Abbott 2007, 10). For example, the Castlevania/Akumajō Dracula (Devil Castle Dracula) action platformer games (1986-) come closest to redefining the literary vampire in video games, but through a distinctly Japanese perspective of Dracula from within the action platform genre (although the folkloric vampire is also nearby); the Witcher series (2007-) explore high fantasy and world folkloric narratives in more detail through an open-world RPG series adapted from a series of novels written by Polish author, Andrzej Sapkowski (although the literary vampire is also nearby); and the tightly scripted but open-ended Vampire: The Masquerade titles embrace vampires clans, US Goth subculture, and city living, to reflect the modern intertwining of capitalist and cultural hierarchies across an entire spectrum of vampire races. Refuting exhaustion, video game vampires are still interested in “Highly sensual scenes of vampirism”, to vacillate “between extreme physical action and tender or erotic moments”, although the player/viewer now has some input in how or when it happens onscreen (Kane 2006, 44). Vampire video games still call attention to the vampire’s status as “a creature constructed by, in relation to, and against contemporary conceptualisations of technology” (Weinstock 2012, 57), frequently serving as corporately mandated tie-ins to other vampire media forms. Furthermore, in addition to feeding off each other for ludogothic inspiration and narratological perpetuation, these vampiric forms operate within a wider transmedia network that incorporates comics, board games, novelisations, and Netflix television adaptations. Vampire video games and video game vampires are not only contextual and intertextual, they are metatextual…
The full 9,100 word version of this article is published in The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, edited by Simon Bacon, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
Carl Wilson 