Epoch’s Dracula House is a tabletop horror maze for Japan’s Digicom series: steer an explorer through three haunted rooms, past a werewolf and vampire bats, to find the treasure hidden in one of Dracula’s four coffins.
Its glowing multicoloured screen sits behind a printed backdrop of crumbling stone, framed by bats and a graveyard cross. The box sets the mission out plainly: gather every fallen jewel, open the coffins and, if Dracula rises, protect yourself with a cross. The American release came in a red box instead.
Interesting facts
Four stages in a thumb’s width. Epoch’s Hara Hiroshi said the screen held what amounted to four stages, gesturing with finger and thumb to show how tiny each one was. Designing in fixed blocks of fluorescent segments made such a crowded layout workable.
Gaps cut in half. NEC made the display tubes, and Epoch pushed its engineers for finer work. Hara recalled asking them to shrink the gaps between lit segments from 0.4 to 0.2 – a big ask for 1982 display technology.
No arcade parent. Epoch usually based its games on arcade hits, but Hara thought this one had none, picked instead for its famous theme. He guessed it sold 200,000 to 300,000 units, while Epoch’s space games passed a million.