Our story
From a One-Man Army to a Full-Fledged Indie Team
In April 2024, Frederik Boelens set out on an ambitious quest: to create a new Vampire Killer for the MSX2.
Like many other MSX fans, he had always felt that Konami’s original Vampire Killer could have been so much more. It had a fantastic foundation and atmosphere, but was also relatively short and limited in several areas. What if that idea could be revisited — only bigger, richer, and built around everything the MSX2 was truly capable of?
Frederik got to work. The first screenshots and videos appeared on forums and YouTube, and slowly the project began to attract attention. One of those early videos carried a simple but rather important subtitle:
“Need help on the graphics.”
That call did not go unanswered.
Jorrith Schaap, a familiar name within the Dutch MSX scene, stepped forward and brought Joël Verdonck along with him. Jorrith threw himself into the music en production part, while Joël began taking the game’s graphics to an entirely new level.
Before long, Arturo Ragozini joined the team as well. His challenge was clear: squeeze everything possible out of the MSX2 video hardware. Samples, horizontal scrolling and all kinds of technical tricks gradually pushed the project far beyond its original Vampire Killer-inspired beginnings.
But as the technology and visuals evolved, so did the ambition.
Patrick Smeets joined the project to help shape the game design. Pat, as he is known to friends, immediately saw the potential. He had never quite abandoned his long-held dream of designing a truly great MSX game himself.
Nightstalker gave him that opportunity.
And from that moment on, the project began to fundamentally change.
What had started as a modern interpretation of Vampire Killer grew into something much larger: a full-scale Metroidvania, with its own world, characters, elaborate stages, secrets, backtracking, boss battles and an increasingly ambitious story.
That growth did not come without growing pains.
As the project expanded, more people, disciplines and ideas had to come together. Koen Dols gradually became one of the connecting forces within the team — bringing people into the project, helping different parts of development find each other and keeping the growing whole moving in the same direction.
And that growing network opened new doors.
To our great delight, Miki Higashino and Tadahiro Nitta both became interested in the project. Two composers with an impressive history in the Japanese game industry, and both said yes to becoming part of Nightstalker.
Not long afterwards, Gryzor87, Nenefranz and Maria Lazano Caballero, well-known names within the Spanish MSX and indie scene, joined the project as well.
With every new addition, the bar was raised a little higher.
The music engine was expanded, the possibilities of SCC and PSG were pushed further, and even the sound effects received the same level of care and attention as the music itself. Graphics, technology, level design, story and audio gradually stopped being separate components and began to form one coherent world.
Nightstalker has now been in development for more than two and a half years.
And no — the finish line has not been reached yet.
But the story has been written. The world exists. The stages have been conceived. The characters have found their place, and more and more ideas that once existed only on paper are now appearing on the screen of an actual MSX2.
Slowly, we are reaching the point where we can finally see the shoreline somewhere in the distance.
2027 is meant to be the year when everything comes together.
The year in which we can finally show the MSX community what all those hours, ideas, discussions, pixels, notes and lines of code have been building towards.
Our goal is, in essence, still the same as it was at the very beginning — only the bar has been raised considerably:
to create an absolutely stunning Metroidvania for the MSX2. A game that looks fantastic, sounds fantastic and, above all, is genuinely great fun to play.
A game we can be proud of.
And hopefully, one the MSX community can be proud of too.
