Resident Evil was originally conceived as a simple modern remake of a virtually unknown nineteen-eighty-nine psychological horror game called Sweet Home.

A closer look

Resident Evil was originally conceived as a simple modern remake of a virtually unknown nineteen-eighty-nine psychological horror game called Sweet Home. Director Shinji Mikami was tasked with bringing the old haunted house concept into the new three-dimensional era of the PlayStation, but he eventually stripped away the supernatural ghost elements in favor of a Romero-inspired zombie outbreak. He kept the infamous door-opening loading screens, the extremely limited inventory slots, and the bizarre mansion puzzles that required solving ridiculous riddles just to open a standard hallway door. The resulting massive success accidentally established the entire survival horror genre, largely off the back of a forgotten movie tie-in game. It implies that the terrifying feeling of desperately conserving shotgun shells while being hunted by biological weapons is actually just a byproduct of terrible nineties architectural logic