~originally written for The CastleVania Dungeon forums, also known as "RSU"

Well, I guess since I was once a part of it, I should be the first, and probably only, to answer.

Garrett Rudkin. He was BORN for CastleVania. Out of all the CV fans I've come across, nobody has ever had quite a presence to me than he.

In the late 90's he set out on a mission to create the ultimate in CastleVania websites...the ultimate CastleVania compendium. That ambition was named The CastleVania Project. He had asked me if I could help him with the CV3 section of it, since it's apparent I'm the CV3 guy around these parts... I agreed to, but I ended up doing a whole lot of nothing for the site. However, it was not by my hand that The CastleVania Project diffused, and contact between he and I broke for years after that.

In 2001 A.D., I joined The CastleVania Dungeon forums and got around a bit. It seemed that the place was really popular, and numerous users tried to best the busiest CV forum by opening their own...suffice it to say certain wannabes should never have started. At that time, I was actively working with Scott Helfrich on CastleVania Interactive (hereafter, CVI), a site that thrives on the fan art and fic submissions of its readers...(this site still stands, by the way, thanks to me)

One thing I told Scott is that we needed a forum. "...everyone's doing it these days!" And so in mid-July, my fam @ CVI will somehow toss a toast for CVI's 1st anniversary as an active forum.

I had established most of myself in record time at the long extinct EZboard forums of The Dungeon, and so I got reacquainted with an old face...that of Garrett Rudkin. So he meandered to my DCTP and CVI sites and absolutely loved what he saw.

Little did I know that at the time, Garrett was brewing something lethal...wicked...huge.

That project was called Planet CastleVania, hereafter PCV.

An obvious stab to the bland ____________Planet-ness of the GameSpy Networks, PCV was christened from the start to be what The CastleVania Project never became, and then some; now, Garrett wanted this place to be a hub for all of the best CastleVania sites. He asked me to join, and I gladly did. He also offered to host my friend's Slogra site, Berrigan's Chambers. He also hosted D'Moon's site, and the site of his ladyfriend. All was well. MP3s encoded directly from his CD collection were stored for our enjoyment, his wonderful reviews remained rightfully verbose... The hosted sites were thriving... Planet CastleVania looked to be a powerful item for the 2001 era. While everything was up and about by August, his clever scheduled debut date was 10-01-01, the binary code for 2001 if I'm not mistaken. A great idea.

But then something went wrong...something went terribly, terribly wrong...

September 2001.

September 27th, 2001.

Garrett has worked for Enegren, the company which loaned him the server. Enegren suddenly blinked and realized that we had a fat load of MP3s on its servers. So...? Apparently, Enegren didn't want them there, and an order was given out to clear out the server...

So in the mid-twenties of September, a diaspora occured, (though one quite smaller than what took place in late August...with The Dungeon's forums) and I hauled back to Fortunecity.

I don't know what happened, but Garrett either erased all of his PCV content and forgot to back them up before reformatting his computer or....something else, but PCV was gone. And it was never heard from again.

But...

...in December, Garrett would try once again.

The name of the new game was Eternal CastleVania. Same aim, but with a different, cleaner, unCastleVaniesque layout. D'Moon and I moved to the new server...which was Garrett's own spare computer.

We had a radio on that site for round-the-clock CV tunes, I would assume; I never listened in.

But JUST before the turn of the year,...

...his hard drive fried out, and with it, were killed the contents stored within; The Domain, DCTP...

I got lucky; I ran into an old friend on the net...the same guy who interviewed me on his site, The Nintendo Old Skool. He offered to host me---as I was moving back into Fortunecity---and I accepted it. As a result, DCTP is much more stable. Unfortunately, I couldn't say the same for m'man Moon...

After Garrett lost Eternal CastleVania, he was essentially never heard from again on these boards.

...and best as I can say it, this is the whole story, and nothing more than the whole story, of Planet CastleVania. Had Planet CastleVania survived... ?

To paraphrase CastleVania III's ending: After this site, the Rudkin name shall be honored by all people.

This should answer any further questions.