Forty years is a long time in gaming. Consoles have come and gone, whole genres were born and buried, and yet we're still talking about a game where a guy with a whip walks into a castle. Polygon just published a retrospective arguing that Konami's early hit changed the course of the video game industry, and it's worth your time if you've ever cared about where our medium actually comes from (read it here).

Castlevania landed on the Famicom Disk System on September 26, 1986, which makes this its 40th anniversary year. Polygon's argument is that its influence paved the way for decades of innovation, and I think that's right, even if the specifics of how it lands on you are mostly a matter of what you grew up playing. For me it was the mood of the thing. Flickering candles, crumbling castle architecture, a soundtrack that felt bigger than the cartridge it lived in. Plenty of games back then were still abstract shapes chasing points, and this one wanted you to feel like you were inside a horror movie. That's how it reads to me today, anyway, and it's a read the game earns every time you boot it up.

The lineage, as I'd trace it (and this is my own take, not sourced history): Symphony of the Night came along in 1997 and flipped the formula into something more exploratory, and somewhere in the years after, the Metroidvania became one of the most enduring design languages indie games ever borrowed. Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, half the games I've covered this year alone feel like they owe their bones to the ideas Konami was working out in the mid-80s. I can't prove that lineage with a chart, but I don't think anyone who loves these games would argue it. Not bad for a game where you commit to your jump the moment you leave the ground.

What hits me hardest, though, is the community angle. These games were hard in a way that forced players together. You traded tips on the playground, drew the candle locations on notebook paper, argued about which weapon to save for Death. There was no wiki, no YouTube guide. The knowledge lived in the people playing. I've written before that the real magic of games is what we build around them, and that was already true in 1986, maybe more true. The players were the strategy guide.

And the legacy itself is untouchable, whatever the publisher's later years looked like. Every side-scrolling action game with moody art and a killer soundtrack is standing on this foundation.

My co-writer TJ likes to say the soul of a series lives in different eras depending on who you ask, and we've been arguing about Final Fantasy's for years. For Castlevania I'd argue the soul lives in that first candle-lit hallway. Deliberate, atmospheric, unapologetically difficult, and built with real conviction about what a game could feel like.

So light a candle for Simon Belmont this year. Forty years later, we're still whipping candles in his honor. If you've got a Castlevania memory, whether it's a rental from the late 80s or your first Hollow Knight run, that lineage is yours too. What's the one game that wired your brain for what games could be?