Konami made over $150,000 from that bloody Castlevania NFT auction

News
By published

Baffling.

Castlevania images being sold as NFTs.
(Image credit: Konami)

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Castlevania, a videogame about a man who thinks the best weapon to use against enemies who can only be killed by piercing their hearts with wood is a metal whip, Konami held an auction for 14 bloody NFTs. 

All the items in the Konami Memorial NFT collection have now been sold, with one of them, the Dracula's Castle Pixel Art, going for $26,732. The grand total for the lot came to over $162,000, though as VGC points out, the OpenSea marketplace they were sold through takes a cut of every transaction, which still leaves Konami with over $157,000 from the auction. 

Since Konami earns a royalty each time one of the NFTs is sold on, they'll keep making money off them as long as the NFT fad lasts.

Funny thing is, the 35th anniversary of the original Castlevania was actually last year. A Konami-owned videogame series that properly turns 35 this year is Metal Gear, with the first game released on the MSX2 in July 1987. We can look forward to Konami celebrating that with more NFTs, I guess. Hooray.

For anyone who is still confused about what NFTs are and why people pay silly amounts of money for them, here's comedian (and voice of Megaera in Hades) Avalon Penrose with a definitely 100% serious explanation.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.