Evil Empire’s Castlevania pitch led to Belmont’s Curse revival at Konami

Castlevania’s latest revival did not begin with Konami rediscovering the series on its own. It started with Evil Empire COO Benjamin Laulan walking into BitSummit 2019 in Kyoto to sell Dead Cells in Japan, then pitching a Castlevania crossover the studio expected would get rejected.

That gamble became Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania, which launched in March 2023 with Richter Belmont and Alucard in the mix. The DLC showed Konami that an outside team could handle the tone, icons, and pacing of a legacy Castlevania project without flattening what makes the series work. Belmont’s Curse now looks like the bigger follow-through on that same partnership.

Konami’s official materials set Belmont’s Curse in 1499 Paris, 23 years after Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, and frame it as an exploration-based 2D action game rather than a roguelite. The company says it marks Castlevania’s 40th anniversary and is being developed with Evil Empire and Motion Twin, with a 2026 release on the books. The setup keeps the series’ 2D action-exploration roots intact while pushing it into a new setting, the streets of 15th-century Paris.

The detail that matters most is who got trusted with the job. Evil Empire spent five years supporting Dead Cells before ending that work in February 2024, which makes the studio an unusually strong fit for a franchise built on feel, iteration, and post-launch discipline. This is not a publisher handing a dormant brand to a random partner and hoping nostalgia does the rest. It is Konami betting on a studio that already proved it could work inside one of its most beloved properties.

That has bigger implications for how legacy series are coming back in the 2020s. A small crossover can serve as a live audition: first the pitch, then the proof, then the bigger assignment. Konami has already said there are “numerous new products” around Castlevania, and Belmont’s Curse reads like part of that wider push rather than a one-off nostalgia play. For Castlevania fans, the revival exists because an outside studio sold Konami on the idea that the castle still had life left in it.