Bram Stoker could hardly have expected, when he published his one good book, that it would inspire whole genres of books, films, and computer games, nor that his titular villain would become one of the most frequently mentioned characters on this blog. Yet here we are, once again discussing Dracula. This time, he appears in the title and on the cover of a computer game from 2000. In it, the player takes on the role of Jonathan Harker1 as he tries to take down Dracula’s last — and wholly uncanonical — sanctuary.
Quite early on in the game, Harker finds a note of Dracula’s, talking about a trap he has set up in his castle: the floor has a chessboard pattern, and if guests step on the wrong square, the floor gives way and they get impaled in a pit underneath it. The end of the note reads:
Chess is a game which2 ends with the king being put to death, unless the pawn dies first, which is far more amusing!
Some of the details of the game, like the fact that the king never gets captures, seem to escape the fanged fiend.
Much later on, in Dracula’s castle, Harker encounters a chessboard. On it, he has to arrange some pieces in the following configuration:3
The bishops look a lot like pawns, but there is a diagram in Dracula’s notebook that leaves nothing to the imagination; they really are bishops, no matter how much I’d prefer the alternative. Obviously, the bishop and knight couldn’t possibly give a double check like this, but that’s the insidiousness of Dracula: whoever wants to proceed must defile himself in order to do so.
It’s good this game only released in 2000, because if this had happened before the 1993-94 congressional hearings on video games, Joe Lieberman would have had a field day and video games would have been as banned as the foulest of hard drugs.
Realism: 0/5 I don’t approve of the blood sucking and I have serious reservations about the H. H. Holmes traps in the castle, but this position is definitely beyond the pale. Like Vladivostok is beyond the French border..
Probable winner: White is checkmate, but I think he has a pretty good case to take to the arbiter.4
1. [Not even for a particular manufacturer’s mood rings, as far as I can ascertain. Just for the idea of mood rings in general. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen any more.] ↩
2. [It should be that instead of which, of course. Dracula murders more than people!] ↩
3. [This is the last sanctuary of those beset by bad diagrams.] ↩
4. [The great arbiter that is god, for only he can judge Dracula.] ↩