100 Things You Never Knew About Resident Evil
92. Resident Evil Gaiden Started Off As Dino Crisis
The infamous port of Resident Evil to the GameBoy Color was doomed to fail. As impressive as the attempt was, dragging a cinematic (well, for the time) PlayStation game over to an 8bit handheld was more than a little bold. However, at least GameBoy owners eventually got a little taste of Biohazard in the form of Resident Evil Gaiden.
But that also didn't happen either. In a 2011 NowGamer interview with some of the team behind the game, sprite artist Curtis Elliot recalled that the game was born from a pitch based off a totally different property. They had produced a Dino Crisis handheld game on request from Capcom and Virgin Interactive and the higher-ups were pretty impressed with it. So much so that Capcom elected to cancel HotGen's RE1 port and put M4 on the job of creating Resident Evil's first handheld spinoff,
On a final note, Tim Hull, the game's producer, mentioned in the same interview that M4 had pushed for the game to be released for the GameBoy Advance - even going so far as to create some graphics for the idea - but Capcom wouldn't shift their stance as the game was too far into development.