Those who are super old-school mobile gamers, or those who have an affinity for PSP Minis I guess, will remember the name iDracula. It launched around this time way back in 2009 and was published by the Golden Developer of the time, Chillingo, and quickly shot up to the top of the charts. It was one of the original dual-stick shooters on mobile before that genre got majorly oversaturated in the years to come, and it basically had you playing as a Van Helsing-esque vampire hunter with an anatomically questionable swiveling torso that allowed you to shoot in any direction with one virtual stick while moving in any direction with the other. What were you shooting? Well vampires, naturally, but also werewolves, witches, and even Dracula himself. It sounds positively mundane explaining it nowadays, but in early 2009 iDracula was THE COOLEST THING. Here is Eli and myself revisiting iDracula back in 2013.

Anyway, a couple of years ago Moregames, the original developers of iDracula, announced that they were working on a spiritual successor of sorts called I, Dracula: Genesis. This new game would also be a dual-stick shooter and feature a Van Helsing-esque protagonist blasting away at eldritch horrors, but other than those very basic concepts everything else in I, Dracula: Genesis was quite a departure from the original. It featured colorful pixel art visuals and a more cartoon-ish style, and a huge emphasis on absolutely over-the-top weaponry. Frankly, it looked BAD ASS and while Moregames had aspirations to bring the new game to mobile at some point, their focus at that time was strictly on releasing the game on desktop first.

Well nearly two years after we first learned about, and more than FIVE years of being in development, the light is finally nearing the end of the tunnel for I, Dracula: Genesis. Moregames has set up a page for the game on Steam and they’re planning on launching the game in Early Access in “early 2020" which they hope to mean at some point in March. There’s also a brand new trailer for the game and it is awesome.

As you can see, the game has come quite a ways since that initial trailer in 2017. Beyond the vampire hunter character, there’s three additional playable characters which include a mad scientist looking guy, a weird cyborg-y looking guy, and a guy who has a hand for a head for some reason. The Steam page also shows off many of the enemies you’ll encounter, and between them and those playable characters, there’s no way you can say that I, Dracula doesn’t have a ton of personality. The Steam page also shows off the game’s ambitious weapon crafting and upgrading system and talks about the multitude of items and relics you’ll come across in the game.

So what does this all have to do with us, the mobile gaming crowd? Well, as Moregames stated in our forums this week, they still would like to bring I, Dracula: Genesis to mobile at some point, but that will definitely not happen if their PC launch is a flop. And in fact they’ll also be bringing the game to the Nintendo Switch, which is more up our alley around here than desktop gaming, and if both the PC and Switch versions do well enough then we will hopefully see I, Dracula: Genesis on mobile sometime down the line. For now if you want to help the game’s success, you can wishlist it on Steam and check out the Steam and/or Switch versions when they launch in a few months. Together, I believe we have the power to get a new iDracula game onto mobile!