In a major win for game preservation, outlet Games That Weren’t has uploaded a near-final ROM of the canceled Resident Evil port for Game Boy Color. Said to be around 98% finished, this build of the game comes from when Capcom officially canceled it in favor of hiring developer M4 to make Resident Evil Gaiden instead.
For some background, nearly three decades ago, developer HotGen was given the job of porting Capcom’s classic survival-horror game to the Game Boy Color in what is maybe the first instance of an official “demake.” It seems Capcom didn’t have faith in porting the full game, with an IGN article from 2000 stating that Capcom believed the port was of poor quality. This was despite the fact that HotGen had included basically everything from the PlayStation game on a tiny Game Boy cartridge.
Uploaded by assistant programmer Pete Frith, he believes the ROM is nearly finished as he recalls a lot of communication between the dev team and QA from around that period. As he recalls, Capcom told the team that Resident Evil’s creator didn’t feel the Game Boy Color was worthy of his creation, and that he had personally instructed the cancellation of the port. We may never know the truth for why this was canned, but at least a near-final build is playable by fans.
This isn’t the first time that any version of Resident Evil for GBC has surfaced. Back in 2011, two different builds of the game were leaked online that were estimated to be around 90% finished. Neither ROM was completable, but Games That Weren’t believes this current one might be. The ending does feature Tyrant, and it is possible to trigger the ending sequence.
I’m sure we’ll find out in a few days if the game is fully playable as speed runners and archivists dig into it.
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