Dracula = "The Count" in "Castlevania"

[DRW]

Does anybody have an idea why Dracula is only called "The Count" in the manual of the original "Castlevania" as well as any additional material?

I mean, was this really supposed to be because of trademarks? Is this the reason the developers named? For a character from 1897?
And what happened when they released "Castlevania II" and used the name Dracula everywhere? Did they now believe they had aquired the rights?

Also, what was the point of not using the name Dracula, if he's called like that in the game itself?

[rainwarrior]

Why do you think it has anything to do with rights? "The Count" seems like a perfectly good name to use.

[DRW]

Why do you think it has anything to do with rights?

Because that's probably the bullshit that the developers would tell you if you asked them.

"The Count" seems like a perfectly good name to use.

Instead of, you know, "Count Dracula".
I'm wondering why the name Dracula never ever appears anywhere in materials concerning the first "Castlevania".

[tepples]

Does anybody have an idea why Dracula is only called "The Count" in the manual of the original "Castlevania" as well as any additional material?

I mean, was this really supposed to be because of trademarks? Is this the reason the developers named? For a character from 1897?

It could have been a fear of ambush litigation. Perhaps Konami considered Stoker's estate litigious, as it had had all but one print of the film Nosferatu destroyed. The only reason copies of Nosferatu survive is widespread piracy of that one print. The copyright in the first authorized film adaptation from 1931 still subsists, and Konami would have had to work carefully around similarities between the in-game appearance of the character and the appearance of the character in the 1931 film. This same restriction made production of Disney's Oz the Great and Powerful more difficult, as a lawyer had to be present to ensure that costume and set design carefully stepped around any details introduced in MGM's film.

[DRW]

It could have been a fear of ambush litigation. Perhaps Konami considered Stoker's estate litigious, as it had had all but one print of the film Nosferatu destroyed.

So, they feared that the copyright that had "Nosferatu" from 1922 banned was still in effect in 1987?

But they included his name into the game nevertheless.

And Frankenstein and Igor are still fair game? Even though, while Dracula just has a generic design (i.e. he doesn't particularly look like Bela Lugosi or Christoper Lee), these two characters are specifically based on the movie version.

Very strange.

Oh, yeah: And the MSX version "Vampire Killer" calls him Dracula again in the materials. Only this time they changed Transylvania to Dransylvania. Are they all a bunch of idiots?

[Movax12]

What does the Japanese manual say? This could be the result of NOA censorship.

[DRW]

The Japanese manual probably says Dracula.

But the question still remains: Why censorship? Why does that name need to be censored?
I mean, I get that they renamed "Demon Castle Dracula" to something not including the word "demon". But why is the name Dracula off-limits, especially when Frankenstein is called by name in the manual?

[Movax12]

Nintendo of America was very strict with their localization process. There were very worried about how fragile the market was (after the video game crash) and wanted to do everything they could to make sure they didn't suffer the same fate as Atari. The name could have been cut just to be extra careful.

[rainwarrior]

I figure if they were worried about rights, "The Count" is a much worse pick than "Dracula", since that name was actually being used contemporarily with the game's development:

[tepples]

And this Count ended up getting his own game using the same voice codec as Big Bird's Hide and Speak.

"Got it!"

[Drew Sebastino]

I would say that the voice samples are very impressive for the NES, but really, is it just that pretty much all others are bad? Doesn't the NES just have a standard DPCM channel? I'm guessing the main reason so many other voice samples in other games on the NES are so bad is due to memory constraints? Has anyone ever actually tried to stream "CD quality" music on the NES?

[lidnariq]

(tangent) The NES only has a 7-bit DAC; while one could reasonably stream (at the cost of all CPU time) audio at ~100kHz, it's harder to compensate for the lesser bit depth.

The DPCM compression format imposes a fairly large quality hit. And is a really lousy compressor too, especially for speech (which compresses very nicely with LPC or similar)

[Drew Sebastino]

So, I take it the voice samples in the game actually are quite impressive, even if there's almost nothing going on when they are being played.

You know, I found this just now and I just couldn't resist showing it:

[rainwarrior]

I would say that the voice samples are very impressive for the NES, but really, is it just that pretty much all others are bad? Doesn't the NES just have a standard DPCM channel? I'm guessing the main reason so many other voice samples in other games on the NES are so bad is due to memory constraints? Has anyone ever actually tried to stream "CD quality" music on the NES?

I disassembled Big Bird's sample decompression here: viewtopic.php?t=8675

In my opinion it is the best sounding speech in an NES game. It's got an unusual compression format but it's basically a little more than 5 bits per sample, raw PCM.

There are 3 factors that I think make NES samples suffer the most:

1. Memory constraints.
2. CPU constraints.
3. DPCM quality constraints.

In Big Bird's case, #1 was solved by compressing to ~5bps, and dedicating most of the cartridge's data to it (including some of the CHR). #2 was solved by dedicating the CPU almost entirely to the sound while it's playing (with small animations carefully placed at split-points within the sample). #3 was solved by not using DPCM.

For other games, DPCM is a solution to #2, and a partial solution to #1 (both at a huge quality loss), but I think #1 is the biggest reason so many games don't even use DPCM samples. They probably thought it was better to use that room for other things than crummy audio samples. With Big Bird, though, they made the game about the audio.

(tangent) The NES only has a 7-bit DAC; while one could reasonably stream (at the cost of all CPU time) audio at ~100kHz, it's harder to compensate for the lesser bit depth.

I actually think the bit-depth isn't the biggest concern. 7 bits allows a signal-to-noise ratio of about 42 decibels, I think, which isn't too bad. I saw a claim that cassette tapes usually had an SNR equivalent to about 5 or 6 bits (video). The quantization noise for the NES is a factor for sure, but I think it really pales in comparison to the problems of memory/CPU/DPCM.

Of course, when you've got continuous music going everything becomes more apparent. I don't like listening to Amiga or GBA hardware recordings much because of the 8-bit audio depth. There's plenty of SuperNSF NSF files that sound reasonably well with 7-bit mixing though. E.g. bananasp.nsf

[Drew Sebastino]

I don't like listening to Amiga or GBA hardware recordings much because of the 8-bit audio depth.

I don't know about the Amiga, but I thought the main problem for the GBA was cheap developers limited memory for voice samples.