MeinMMO demon Cortyn reminisces about the past and reports on a game that had long-term consequences – perfect for the Find Your Next Game: Love Edition.
How we all came to our “gaming love” is different for everyone. My colleagues have already summed it up in a very emotional video, which ultimately inspired me to write this article.
Like our Toffi, I loved Final Fantasy IX back in the day as well. I didn’t own a PlayStation myself, but I had a friend – and convinced him on his birthday to buy the game with his birthday money. Luckily, he didn’t regret it.
But I really “dived into” the world of games in a completely different way, through a game that had no major publisher and only existed in German.
Some of the older ones among you might recall “Bravo Screenfun.” It was a magazine, somewhat like “Computerbild Spiele” – only cooler. One of the magazine’s CDs included the game “Vampires Dawn,” accompanied by a very long workshop article on the “RPG Maker 2000.”
Vampires Dawn tells the story of three vampires, namely Asgar, Alaine, and Valnar. Until the start of the storyline, Valnar was a human who gets turned into a vampire by Asgar and is meant to serve him. However, Valnar hates Asgar and still sees himself as more of a human, while his creator strives to slowly accustom Valnar to his existence as a vampire and drive out his humanity. Alaine, on the other hand, is Asgar’s fiancée and also a vampire. She tries to mediate the conflicts between the two, even if that often doesn’t succeed.
I don’t want to go too deep into the story, as you should experience it for yourselves. The original Vampires Dawn has “pixel graphics” reminiscent of the earlier Final Fantasy titles, but that is the charm of all RPG Maker games.
Like in a JRPG, you travel through the world, fight enemies, learn new skills, and can make various choices. The world brims with side quests and has quite an adult charm that I liked even back then. Blood and violence are – albeit in pixel graphics – on par with The Witcher, and even more “questionable” topics like executions, brothels, and abuse of power are themes of the game.
I was thrilled by the game world and the possibilities. Not only could you freely travel the world with dozens of cities and hidden places, but you could also make an incredible number of choices. Almost every NPC in the game could be drained of blood, killed, or simply transformed into useful items. If one wished, one could wipe out an entire city to enrich oneself.
The implications were huge. Killing a character meant that they could no longer offer any side quests later. What is now quite common in games like Skyrim or Witcher III was incredibly interesting for me back then. The fact that Vampires Dawn had multiple endings depending on the player’s choices was also a rarity at that time.
Sure, in some respects, Vampires Dawn hasn’t aged well. There are indeed a few “grind” passages where you need to farm mobs for a while; as was common in JRPGs of that time. You also cannot always save, but must expend a limited resource for that – also a decision people probably wouldn’t make today.
While I had played games before Vampires Dawn, no game before or after sparked my interest in “games as a whole” the way it did.
Vampires Dawn was a “1-Man Project” – That Inspired Me Too
What fascinated me back then and still does: Vampires Dawn was created single-handedly by Alexander “Marlex” Koch. To me, the idea was completely overwhelming that a single person could create a game using the RPG Maker that one could invest several dozen hours into.
In the mornings at school, I used the short breaks (and a few hours of geography, German, and religion) to draw maps of houses and cities in my notebook, which I could later translate into the RPG Maker in the afternoon. I thought about how the story should unfold in a village, what side quests there were, what rewards and secrets existed. Once home, I virtually stormed the PC. While I was blasted with music from Rammstein and Die Ärzte, I worked hour after hour on the RPG Maker.
It was a level of euphoria and drive that I had never known before and have rarely experienced since. It lasted for weeks and months. I even sacrificed the beloved summer holidays to learn more and more about the RPG Maker and gradually improve.
YouTube did not exist back then, or at least not to the extent it does today. So if I wanted to learn something I didn’t understand, I had to load “Vampires Dawn” from my idol Marlex into the RPG Maker and see how the “great master” had done it.
I spent hours and days combing through the game, observing how NPCs had different dialogues, what “switches” and “variables” could do, how to create your own spell effects, and how to apply different brightness effects with oversized pixel images. Marlex was my great teacher, even though he never knew it and probably never will.
Some might now say that I wasted more than a year. After all, my own game was never completed. It had a playtime of around 10 hours and consisted of over 400 different maps – but failed due to my unrealistic expectations.
Young, naive, and overly motivated as I was, I naturally wanted to make a game that was even bigger – and ultimately it grew overwhelming. Worse still: As I improved more and more over the months, I realized that the quality of my game fluctuated drastically.
The first maps and the intro of the game were of such poor quality that I should have started over. On one hand, it was incredibly fulfilling to realize how much I had improved. But on the other hand, the project, which I had poorly planned, had grown bigger and ultimately fizzled out.
Years later, I think today: Regarding the Nether, the first hours of my game were terrible. Full of clichés, ugly maps, and terrible dialogues. No one should ever see that. However, I am still proud of the later hours of gameplay. I still see how much I can improve in something if I really commit.
That time also helped me develop more understanding for developers and bugs. How easily fixing a bug elsewhere can cause a new bug, you realize with the RPG Maker every few minutes.
Additionally, I was able to use my skills in RPG Maker years later to create small videos for my Pen & Paper group, which parodied and reminisced about the adventures of the last gaming sessions. The videos also have an extremely high “cringe” factor – yet are unforgettable memories for me.
But before I stray any further, I want to slowly close the loop. Vampires Dawn and my resulting interest in RPG Maker have profoundly shaped me and largely formed my love for games. Since Vampires Dawn, I have been curious to learn more about how game worlds are created and how mechanics work from a developer’s perspective. I love telling my own stories and creating narratives, which ultimately led to my passion for role-playing – whether in Pen & Paper or MMORPG.
A few years ago, the 3rd part of Vampires Dawn was released on Steam – nearly 2 decades after the first game.
I must confess that I completely missed that. But after learning about it, the game was immediately purchased. In my next vacation, I will definitely play through it to dive back into the universe of “Marlex” and find out how the war between humans and vampires goes to the next round with plenty of pixel blood.
Indirectly, I owe a lot to Vampires Dawn: Reign of Blood. I don’t know if I would have the job I have today without Vampires Dawn – or whether my interest in games would still be so strong had the RPG Maker not had such an attraction on me.
