Koji Igarashi grew up in Shirakawa, in Fukushima Prefecture, and as a boy he could see the ruins of Komine Castle from his bedroom window. As a teenager, he told Eurogamer, he took a cheap camcorder into the ruined grounds most mornings and filmed a little further in each time. He spent much of his working life doing something similar at Konami: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997), the game he is known for, is one enormous castle that the player explores room by room, and its structure became the pattern for a decade of Castlevania games he produced. Fans called them “Igavanias”. When Konami stopped making them, he left, asked players for the money to make another, and got eleven times what he asked for.
Fast facts
- Born: 1968, in Fukushima Prefecture.
- Konami: joined straight from university at the start of the 1990s; left on 15 March 2014.
- Early work: programming on Konami’s PC Engine games, including a TwinBee; the story of the dating game Tokimeki Memorial.
- Symphony of the Night (1997): assistant director, scenario writer and programmer.
- Castlevania producer: from the early 2000s, on the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2 and DS; director of Dawn of Sorrow (2005).
- Bloodstained: Kickstarter from 11 May to 13 June 2015, $5,545,991 from 64,867 backers against a $500,000 goal; Ritual of the Night released in 2019, and The Scarlet Engagement due in 2027.
From BASIC to Konami
Igarashi’s family could not afford a computer. After seeing an arcade game running on an older friend’s machine, he taught himself BASIC from enthusiast magazines, writing games on the friend’s computer and on a display model in a local electronics shop and leaving them there for other people to play. The first was a shoot-’em-up based on Gundam. When BASIC became too slow, he borrowed a book on assembly language from a friend, which, he admitted, he never gave back.
“As soon as I graduated from college, I went straight into Konami,” he told Wired. His first project there was not a game: Konami had just set up a business-software division and gave his group of new graduates a business training simulation to write. They loved Fire Emblem, he said, so they “interpreted the instruction as a brief to make a business-themed Fire Emblem game”. It was cancelled after a year. He moved to a team writing programming tools for the PC Engine, working on Konami’s TwinBee and Gradius II conversions for that console.
Then, although he was a programmer, he was told to write the story for Tokimeki Memorial, a dating game set in a high school. His girlfriend, later his wife, worked in the next office on Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and she helped him with plot ideas and took him round clothes shops to research places for the game’s dates. Tokimeki Memorial was a hit, which Igarashi described as “a social phenomenon at the time”. His boss wanted a sequel. Igarashi said he had run out of romance, and was shown a list of Konami’s projects and told to pick one. He pointed at Castlevania.
Symphony of the Night
Castlevania was made at Konami’s headquarters in Kobe. Symphony of the Night was being made in Tokyo, where Igarashi worked, and so it counted as a spin-off. “Because of that we were allowed free rein to do pretty much whatever we wanted,” he said. Its director was Toru Hagihara, who had directed Rondo of Blood. Igarashi was assistant director, and he also wrote some of the scenario and some of the program. “It could be argued that he had the most telling influence over proceedings,” Retro Gamer wrote.
The team took Super Metroid as its model and gave up the stage-by-stage structure of the earlier games for one large castle. Igarashi wanted to change “the impression that Castlevania was this difficult-to-access action game”, so the game borrowed from role-playing games: “we agreed that users should receive something good when beating enemies. So I thought of adding Experience Points to the game.” The hero was not a whip-carrying Belmont but Alucard, Dracula’s son, which worried Igarashi: “I presumed that those who had been fans for a long time would be angry.” The Japanese title was Akumajō Dracula X; “I used ‘X’ to show that it would be apart from the main stream of the series,” he said, “but surprisingly, it has now become the mainstream.”
The game had to last. Igarashi had seen used copies of shorter Castlevania games piling up in a bargain bin, and one of his team suggested a way to double its length cheaply: “If we flip the castle upside down during the game then we’d have twice as much content.” The work was long. He remembered being at his desk when the temple bells rang in the new year of 1996. The game came out in Japan in March 1997. It became a best-seller in America but sold badly in Europe, where Retro Gamer put the first PAL shipment at around 15,000 copies, many of them discounted before they sold.
Wireframe has noted that Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1987), with its open world, inspired Igarashi’s work on Symphony, even though he has said that game left a poor impression on Japanese players.
Producing the series
Igarashi became the producer of the whole Castlevania series. Konami’s first Game Boy Advance Castlevania, Circle of the Moon (2001), came from another team, but he produced the next two, Harmony of Dissonance (2002) and Aria of Sorrow, in Symphony‘s mould. Edge later described them as the games “through which Igarashi has quietly continued the series’ 2D bloodline”.
At the same time he tried to take the series into three dimensions. Introducing Castlevania: Lament of Innocence for the PlayStation 2 in 2003, Edge reported his “modest goal”: “to have a copy of Castlevania in every single household”, which he thought needed 3D. The results disappointed. “We certainly got a lot of feedback from the press about what was missing in Lament,” he told Electronic Gaming Monthly in 2005, promising “huge interconnected maps” in its sequel, Curse of Darkness. Looking back in 2014, he said that moving the design into 3D brought “enormous pressure” to raise the graphical detail, and camera problems that needed a film director’s eye.
The 2D games moved to the Nintendo DS. Igarashi directed Dawn of Sorrow (2005). “Much like in Symphony of the Night, I wanted to give players a little bit of freedom,” he told Electronic Gaming Monthly, and the magazine quoted him that year: “I feel like the [Nintendo] DS is the last fortress of 2D gaming.” Portrait of Ruin followed in 2006 and Order of Ecclesia in 2008. In 2010 he produced Harmony of Despair, a 2D Castlevania for Xbox Live Arcade, in the same year that a 3D reboot of the series, Lords of Shadow, was made by the Spanish studio MercurySteam with Hideo Kojima as executive producer.
At press events he dressed the part. Wired described him turning up at E3 “brandishing a fedora and a whip”.
Metroidvania
Igarashi’s games gave the Metroidvania genre half its name, but he did not coin the word. He told Eurogamer in 2014 that he had first heard it the year before, when he saw a Facebook group dedicated to his game. The rival nickname “Igavania”, after him, is used in the same way; Wireframe filed Bloodstained under that genre.
Leaving Konami
Konami turned towards mobile games. Igarashi moved to the mobile side of the company to try to make console-style games for phones, and, Wired reported, “after years there, he didn’t release a single game”. “It was very hard to try and find that fit,” he said. In 2023 he told a conference audience in Monaco that this was when “I heard the voice of a devil inside me telling me to quit.”
He had never worked anywhere else, and he took his cue from Keiji Inafune, who had left Capcom and used Kickstarter to fund a spiritual successor to Mega Man. “Seeing Inafune’s example showed me that fans have power,” Igarashi said. His last day at Konami was 15 March 2014, and he announced his departure at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that month. “I’m extremely nervous,” he told Eurogamer. “I have a family and, to be honest, lifetime employment is attractive.” He became a founder of a new studio, ArtPlay. Konami lost Kojima the following year.
Bloodstained
On 11 May 2015 Igarashi launched a Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which Wired called “essentially a classic Castlevania without Konami’s trademarks”. The game already had investment behind it. The $500,000 goal was meant to enlarge the budget, pay for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One discs, and build a connection between Igarashi and Western players. It was reached within four hours. When the campaign closed on 13 June 2015, 64,867 backers had pledged $5,545,991, with more coming in through PayPal.
A smaller, 8-bit-style spin-off, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, made with Inti Creates, came out first, in 2018. Ritual of the Night, developed by ArtPlay and published by 505 Games, followed in June 2019. Wireframe reviewed it under the genre heading “Igavania”, called it “a Castlevania game in all but name” and gave it 74%: its castle was “a treat to explore”, but it was held back by “a disappointing slew of bugs and glitches” and puzzles so vague that the reviewer wandered for an hour looking for a trigger he had missed. “There’s no denying ArtPlay succeeded in creating exactly what it said it was going to,” the review concluded.
In June 2025, 505 Games announced Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement, a 2.5D action role-playing game set in the 16th century and produced by Igarashi, for 2026. In August 2026 Igarashi said in a video message that it would be delayed to 2027: “Currently, the development of the game has entered its final stages.”
Sources
- Simon Parkin, “Unfinished symphony: Castlevania’s keeper speaks”, Eurogamer, 9 April 2014 (web, secondary; interview with Igarashi): Komine Castle and his birth year; his age in March 2014; learning BASIC and assembly language; the Konami business simulation; the PC Engine, TwinBee and Gradius II; Tokimeki Memorial and choosing Castlevania; Kobe and Tokyo; the spin-off’s “free rein”; the inverted castle and the New Year of 1996; 3D; first hearing “Metroidvania”; Inafune; his nerves about leaving. https://www.eurogamer.net/unfinished-symphony-castlevanias-keeper-speaks
- “The making of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night”, Retro Gamer issue 36, 2007, pp. 48–51: joining Konami in the early 1990s; Toru Hagihara as director; Igarashi as assistant director, scenario writer and programmer; Super Metroid; experience points; Alucard; “Akumajo Dracula X”; the PAL print run of about 15,000.
- Retro Gamer issue 35, 2007: caption, Igarashi “once programmed a Twinbee game for the PC-Engine”.
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010, Castlevania series history: Igarashi becoming producer of the whole series; Symphony of the Night’s platinum status in America; the three Game Boy Advance games; Portrait of Ruin in 2006; Lords of Shadow by MercurySteam, overseen by Kojima.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 188, February 2005: Dawn of Sorrow preview, addressed to “fans of Igarashi’s previous Game Boy Advance Castlevania titles”.
- Edge issue 51, November 1997, Symphony of the Night review, as cited in the Metroidvania entry: the Japanese release in March 1997.
- Wireframe issue 62, April 2022: Jack Yarwood on Hitoshi Akamatsu and Simon’s Quest, and its influence on Igarashi.
- IGN Unplugged issue 15, August 2002: Harmony of Dissonance due that autumn.
- Wikipedia, “Castlevania: Circle of the Moon” (web, secondary): developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe, without Igarashi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Circle_of_the_Moon
- Edge issue 125, July 2003: Castlevania: Lament of Innocence preview (“to have a copy of Castlevania in every single household”). Issue 155, November 2005: Dawn of Sorrow review. Issue 217, August 2010: Harmony of Despair and Lords of Shadow at E3.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 190, April 2005: Curse of Darkness preview. Issue 196, October 2005, p. 64: Dawn of Sorrow preview, with Igarashi as director. Issue 197, November 2005: “the last fortress of 2D gaming”.
- Retro Gamer issue 25, 2006: Portrait of Ruin announced. Retro Gamer issue 52, 2008: Order of Ecclesia announced.
- Chris Kohler, “Castlevania’s Producer Emerges From the Wreckage of Konami”, Wired, 11 May 2015 (web, secondary): the fedora and whip; the move to mobile; going straight to Konami from college; Inafune; the Kickstarter launch, its goal and purposes; Ben Judd on the backing investment. https://www.wired.com/2015/05/koji-igarashi-bloodstained-kickstarter/
- Michael McWhertor, “Veteran Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi leaves Konami”, Polygon, 17 March 2014 (web, secondary): his last day, 15 March 2014. https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/17/5514588/koji-igarashi-castlevania-leaves-konami
- Damien McFerran, “‘The Voice Of A Devil’ Told Me To Quit Konami, Says Former Castlevania Producer”, Time Extension, 13 March 2023 (web, secondary), reporting IGN’s coverage of his talk at MAGIC 2023. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2023/03/the-voice-of-a-devil-told-me-to-quit-konami-says-former-castlevania-producer
- Wireframe issue 10, March 2019, pp. 50–51: “Konami at 50”, the departures of Kojima and Igarashi.
- Kickstarter, “Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night” project statistics (web): 64,867 backers, $5,545,991 pledged. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iga/bloodstained-ritual-of-the-night
- “Bloodstained Kickstarter Ends with US$5.5 Million, Reaches Final Stretch Goal”, Anime News Network, 13 June 2015 (web, secondary): launch on 11 May, the goal met within four hours, the total and the PayPal pledges. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-06-13/bloodstained-kickstarter-ends-with-usd5.5-million-reaches-final-stretch-goal/.89225
- Wireframe issue 22, September 2019: Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. Wikipedia, “Koji Igarashi” (web, secondary): Curse of the Moon with Inti Creates in 2018; Ritual of the Night in June 2019; ArtPlay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koji_Igarashi
- Richard Wakeling, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night review, Wireframe issue 19, July 2019, pp. 56–57 (74%; ArtPlay and 505 Games; “Igavania”).
- Jason Ryan, “Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement revealed, launches on PS5 in 2026”, PlayStation Blog, 4 June 2025. https://blog.playstation.com/2025/06/04/bloodstained-the-scarlet-engagement-revealed-launches-on-ps5-in-2026/
- “Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement delayed to 2027”, Gematsu, 26 August 2026 (web, secondary): Igarashi’s video message. https://www.gematsu.com/2026/08/bloodstained-the-scarlet-engagement-delayed-to-2027