Will Vampire Survivors Ever Have an Actual Vampire? We Asked the Creator
The success of 2022 roguelike shoot-em-up Vampire Survivors took everyone by surprise, but no one so much as its creator, Luca ‘poncle’ Galante.
Galante began development of Vampire Survivors while unemployed in 2020, deriving inspiration from mobile game Magic Survival and Galante’s past experience developing flashy graphics for slot machines. He never intended Vampire Survivors to make it big — he just wanted to make something fun and manage a little community around it.
Vampire Survivors launched in early access in December of 2021. Now, almost exactly a year later, it’s seen a huge Steam concurrent player takeover, a full release, DLC, a mobile release that netted it over one million downloads in a week, critical praise, and a Game Awards nomination for Best Debut Indie Game.
Galante has been interviewed before about Vampire Survivors’ unexpected success at launch, and months later, he tells IGN that its continued acclaim is “just as unexpected throughout all these months as it was initially.” Its sales have allowed him to start a company and hire others to help him work on Vampire Survivors as well as other potential future projects. And together they’ve achieved his personal goals for Vampire Survivors much faster than he had initially expected, including bringing it to more platforms and adding more content. In fact, version 1.0 – launched in October – contains more than twice the content Galante originally planned for.
The award nominations and win are the most recent of Galante’s successes. He’s thrilled, of course, if seemingly a bit non-plussed that his project ended up on the same stage as games like Elden Ring and God of War.
“It was straight up incredible to be nominated for The Game Adverts [sic] alongside all
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