In 2012, NeocoreGames announced that the studio was working on an action-RPG starring a young descendant of Abraham Van Helsing (originally introduced in Bram Stoker’s Dracula). But where did this idea come from?

According to narrative designer Viktor Juhász, it all started with a broken leg.

By the time King Arthur II came out, the studio was already trying to think about a new project, but because of the many tasks surrounding development, there was very little time to just sit down and come up with interesting ideas.

„Then I broke my leg,” remembers Viktor. „I couldn’t sit at a computer for weeks. Now I had time for ideas.” He then submitted three different concepts, although he had a favorite in mind. Luckily, the studio on the whole agreed on which was the best.

The idea was to create a smaller game with a young protagonist. Anything but an RTS, really. The Nintendo DS at the time was becoming very popular, so the studio started exploring small-scale games, and this idea was perfect. Classic monsters, a monster hunter extraordinaire, and mad scientists. Gothic, noir, witty remarks. The name Van Helsing was already known thanks to the many adaptations, so it had some potential.

The plan was to follow Abraham Van Helsing’s son, a very young kid who just started out in the monster hunting business. Small project, few people, quirky, compact game. As things progressed, though, the game outgrew the Nintendo DS. The reception of the initial art style was lukewarm, so it was scrapped in favor of a more realistic direction, although there was a community poll about which look of the protagonist they preferred.

The project started growing into a large PC game, and the entire studio was soon working on it. This new action-RPG was inspired by Diablo, but instead of going big and service-like, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing insisted on a well-written campaign and a smaller scope in Borgovia, a weird science version of Transylvania, with an occasional joke. And of course, very memorable characters: young Van Helsing, his ghost companion Lady Katarina, and the antagonist Fulmigati.

In turn, developers who were really into RPGs had the opportunity to work on a real progression system – the institutional knowledge about leveling, skills and loot turned out to be essential for later games.

While previous games by NeocoreGames were received well, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was a hit both commercially and critically. The studio returned to self-publishing, this way Van Helsing brought financial security and a good reputation for the studio, allowing us to explore new ways to grow.

While NeocoreGames started negotiating with Games Workshop for an action-RPG, the studio expanded on the Van Helsing series to gain necessary routine in RPG development – two sequels were developed, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II came out in 2014, while The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III came out in a very busy 2015.

While a spinoff was also in development, NeocoreGames decided to combine the three games into one, creating an alternative mix to play these games, combining the best parts and cutting a few repetitive parts here and there. The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut was released later in 2015. By this time the first game reached a milestone of over 1 Million units sold, and to this day it’s one of our most popular games.

During the development of these games we expanded the studio with a console porting team who started immediately working on bringing the Van Helsing games to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, marking our first attempts at console development, learning about the differences between PC games, including certification processes, console UI, and many more intricate and challenging tasks. And even though we just started out, we didn’t want our games to be developed by external studios. In 2015, our first console port launched on the Xbox One, followed by the PlayStation 4 roughly a year later. An interesting side note: we also explored possibilities to port the game to iOS, and it ran (as you can see in this April's Fools video), but ultimately, this was abandoned, because we did not have any experience in publishing mobile games, it was a very unfamiliar world to us.

This concludes the development of The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, a game that hides its successors within the game in plain sight: a tower defense minigame and an easter egg depicting a mysterious armour from the grim future of mankind.

But these are stories for other days.