Remember when I fell back in love with the art of mapping out video games, sometime last summer? I haven't had a lot of time to work on those projects over the past couple of months, but the ones I have been able to pour my efforts into, I've tried to make it count. Castlevania, for example.

Get it? Count? As in Dracula? Right.

Anyway, after working with Fangamer to get the Metroid and MSX Metal Gear maps published a few months back, I decided that these mapping ventures needed just a little more polish in order to look like cool, compelling purchases. The previous maps look pretty great in person, in my opinion, but they don't really read well as thumbnail images. But what, I thought, if the next map I create works at both levels? So I spent a few days really pouring my full effort into the final Castlevania map, and, well… I think it looks pretty good.

Better yet, it works at multiple sizes. Not only does it make a dense and intriguing thumbnail, it also works as a full banner poster (36x12") as well as a crazy oversized piece (72x24"). Well, admittedly, I haven't seen the six-foot version myself, but Fangamer tells me it looks nice.

And speaking of Fangamer, you can purchase this poster via their web store. And it's available in both sizes (three feet or six feet). Each one is printed to order! That does make them a little pricier than mass-printed posters, but the quality is also much nicer than some poster you'd buy at Walmart. 

I'm really proud of how this poster turned out. Mapping Castlevania is a bit of a cheat, because it's linear and the game was actually designed around creating a sense of progression through a visible work of architecture, but having all the little details drawn out like this (and tweaked to line up in ways that the original game map didn't quite match, like the alignment of the water level in the castle's foundations) really makes for a fun poster piece. I need to order myself a copy…

• jeremy parish
• castlevania
• size-l
• cart-ography
• Fangamer