A 12-year fan project puts Super Metroid's Samus, with her weapons and a Baby Metroid, inside Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's castle

The word “Metroidvania” is two game names jammed together. In this project, both halves share one screen.

BigSharkZ, a homebrewer, spent about 12 years building a game in which Samus Aran, the bounty hunter from 1994’s Super Metroid, walks through Dracula’s castle from Symphony of the Night. Time Extension reports that the art and animations are new, not sprite swaps, and that Samus keeps her Super Metroid weapons and abilities.

The castle gets new gear to match. The project adds Save stations and Charge stations, plus a Baby Metroid familiar that trails Samus through the halls, new lore explaining what she is doing in Transylvania, hidden items, alternate suits, weapon pickups and returning Metroid enemies. There is also a timed escape sequence, the sprint-for-the-exit kind.

The reveal is a gameplay video titled “Metroid x Castlevania - Samus in Symphony of the Night (Gameplay Reveal).”

Play the video on YouTube

The French site ROM-Game reports that BigSharkZ posted the video on November 8, 2026, and that the mod runs on original PlayStation hardware. It says the project began in 2014 as a recreation of the Super Metroid engine in Construct 2, then moved onto sotn-decomp, a decompilation of Konami’s game that makes the original code editable. Twelve years back from 2026 lands about there, which squares with Time Extension’s figure.

What the video shows, per ROM-Game, is Samus keeping Super Metroid’s controls and physics: beams, the Morph Ball, the Speed Booster and Shinespark. The modder says he drew the new pixel art himself, including cutscenes and new suits. Chozo journals scattered through the castle connect that people to Dracula’s home, and former enemies show up as bosses, some powered up by Chaos. ROM-Game lists extras including a soundtrack choice, FUSION and PHAZON modes, and the final escape sequence, with Alucard and Richter modes still playable.

Dracula and a Metroid are an obvious pairing: one drains blood, the other drains energy. Giving Samus a Baby Metroid sidekick in his castle is a cute inversion of that.

BigSharkZ isn’t alone in the idea. ROM-Game says a second project, from the YouTube channel monkilabs and also called “Metroidvania: Symphony of the Night,” has been posting development videos since October 17, 2026. It also runs on PlayStation and uses sotn-decomp, with a prologue where Samus fights Dracula and new moves like a Frost Kick. Both projects describe themselves as non-commercial and unaffiliated with Konami or Nintendo.

Where does BigSharkZ’s version stand? Time Extension says it is nearing completion, with tweaks, bug testing and final touches left. ROM-Game says its builder describes it as complete in features and still needing testing and fixes, and that he plans to publish it on his own website. Neither gives a release date.

Fans of both games tend to know them room by room, so whenever this ships it will be judged on small things: how the Speed Booster feels on a staircase, and whether the Save stations sit where a player would want them. Two competing Samus-in-Symphony builds make the comparison inevitable, and BigSharkZ has the head start of a video that passed 150,000 views, according to ROM-Game.

Symphony of the Night has been a mod target before, including a disc mod that adds Saturn areas. With an editable decompilation under two separate crossovers this month, more are plausible.

No release date yet.