Resident Evil Originally Meant For The SNES

Resident Evil is a franchise with a long history. First launched on the PlayStation, the franchise went on to spawn numerous games, live-action films and animated movies in 21 years.

In a recent interview with Game Informer, Capcom’s Koji Oda talked revisited the history of the franchise and shed some light on the franchise that was previously unknown.

According to Oda, Resident Evil was initially developed for the SNES as well. It was unknown if development for both the PlayStation ran in parallel but a Resident Evil for SNES was indeed briefly in the works.

“Typically, games would take half a year and no longer than a year to develop, so I feel like I was able to take part in a lot of different projects. It’s not that well known, but before Resident Evil went to the PlayStation, I was working on it for the Super NES.”

Oda even went on to explain why the game did not make it to the SNES. The SNES cartridge just did not have enough space for it. Even if they were to persist with developing for the SNES, it would have looked way different from the PlayStation’s Resident Evil.

“This was back before the name Resident Evil had even been assigned to it,” says Oda. “The codename for this was literally just ‘horror game.’ On the SNES, we were working with limited hard drive space, so it’s not like we could dump a movie in there. If we had actually completed it on the SNES, I’m sure it would have been considerably different. For example, it was originally set in a place that had nothing to do with reality – more of a hellish place.”

Many years from then Resident Evil has developed leaps and bounds. Its latest game on the Nintendo platform, Resident Evil Revelations 1 and 2 was an updated re-release for the Nintendo Switch.