Castlevania: Belmont's Curse producer Tsutomu Taniguchi explains that he proposed the development of a new game in the series after reading comments from Metroidvania fans who'd never played a Castlevania game.
Castlevania may be the one half of the genre name, but according to Taniguchi, many self-professed Metroidvania fans admit they've never played any games from the franchise. In an interview with Famitsu, he spoke about how development of Castlevania:Belmont's Curse began from this revelation.
As translated by GamesRadar+ Taniguchi says, "I was a fan of Castlevania long before I started on this project. Since joining Konami, I kept seeing people on social media and in fandoms saying that they love Metroidvanias but they've never played a Castlevania game. They might have seen the anime, but they'd never played the games."
Taniguchi realized that while Castlevania has good brand recognition, it doesn't mean that everyone has had the chance to play the games. "I started to think about what I could do about this as both a Konami employee and a fan," Taniguchi says. "So we began by porting old games to collections to create a way for people to play previous works."
Castlevania has received three larger game collections: 2019's Castlevania Anniversary Collection, 2021's Castlevania Advance Collection, and most recently 2024's Castlevania Dominus Collection. Despite the wide range of series games distributed across these collections, the series' most popular entry, Symphony of the Night, hasn't been part of a collection since the PSP's Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles and its update 2018's Castlevania: Requiem.
"We also wanted to build more ways for new players to experience Castlevania, like the [Dead Cells] DLC I mentioned previously," Taniguchi continues. "Of course, I also wanted to see something new, so I proposed Castlevania: Belmont's Curse."
