Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Hits $5 Million

We’ve been following the progress of the Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Kickstarter campaign since the beginning. It’s the new project of Koji “IGA” Igarashi, the man behind the Castlevania games that many players know and love.

With about 8 hours to go until the campaign closes, backers have done what even IGA himself thought impossible: The project has been backed for $5,000,000. That’s a lot of money, and that just proves that there is still so much love for this genre. We have proven that to the naysayers that told IGA that this project would not take off.

What started out as a campaign for a modest $500,000 quickly spiraled out of control in the best way possible. It only took four hours to reach that initial goal, and at unimaginable speed, backers were hitting one stretch goal after another.

At the moment, the Kickstarter campaign does not say that it’s hit $5M. That’s because roughly $150K was sent in through Paypal and hasn’t been reflected in the campaign. In the latest Kickstarter update, IGA writes of how he thought that they would get $800,000 at most if they were lucky. That’s a far cry from the Number 1 Video Game Kickstarter of All Time that Bloodstained has become.

Of course, on the way to $5 million, backers managed to unlock a couple of other stretch goals: We’re getting a third playable character (not too many details on this yet), a prequel mini-game that will tackle the events prior to Miriam’s awakening, and now, a Rogue-like Dungeon Mode.

As a nice little bonus, Shovel Knight will also be making an appearance in the game! Earlier in the Kickstarter campaign, Yuji Natsume drew fan art of the adorably clunky warrior, and Yacht Club Games agreed to let the buffed-up knight join the cast of Bloodstained. There are no details yet on his role in the game, but we look forward to bumping into him.

Congratulations, Army of the Night! You’ve done it, you’ve pushed Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night as far as it can go. Now, we wait until March 2017. Maybe watching IGA play the game will help with the wait?