Castlevania: The Bloodletting
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Castlevania: The Bloodletting is a cancelled Castlevania game that was intended to be released for the Sega Mega Drive's Sega 32X add-on sometime in 1996 or 1997. Presumably, it was to star Richter Belmont and Maria Renard. Some recovered artwork from prototypes of the game showed sprites that looked remarkably like Richter and Maria, as well as a third, unknown individual.
Although announced for the Sega 32X (with two reported, although currently unrecovered, screenshots released), the game soon disappeared from the radar. Sometime thereafter, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was announced for the Sony PlayStation. It is assumed that the development team that was working on The Bloodletting eventually became SotN team, and their work was used in part or in whole in SotN (again, the similarities between certain sprites would point in that direction).
Current Castlevania project leader/producer Koji "IGA" Igarashi has stated that The Bloodletting indeed eventually became Symphony of the Night. With the cancellation of the 32X as a viable development platform, the team was tasked with developing a "new" game. What was usable from The Bloodletting was then absorbed into the Symphony of the Night project.
