100 Things You Never Knew About Resident Evil

Resident Evil's infamous abandoned port to GameBoy Color sure is a sight to behold. Even if it was never going to work, it's impressive that someone tried.

To a certain extent that's true of this entry too, which is an honest-to-goodness NES bootleg of the game... and it's surprisingly good.

First of all, a little context: China has had a long, complicated history with video games and imported works and never got the NES back in it's heyday. However, that didn't stop people from developing systems that could play NES cartridges and knock-offs as "educational hardware", especially since Nintendo's patents on the hardware expired in the mid-2000s. Chinese players who couldn't get their hands on the PlayStation version of Resident Evil, for example, could at least play a bootlegged version that somebody made for NES.

And this thing is impressive. Sure, it only features Jill's playthrough, is missing most of the bosses and doesn't quite have the same production value... but almost the entirety of the game is here in some form. The mansion is the same, the puzzles are the same, even the enemy layout is the same. The major change is the introduction of the Gaiden battle system rather than simply aiming and shooting from afar which, with the now giant hallways of the Spencer Mansion, means most enemies can absolutely be run past if you wanted to.

This is all to say it would be very few people's preferred way to play the classic Resident Evil, but the NES bootleg is a novelty whose existence is just so weird that it's hard not to love.