In a recent interview with Eurogamer at Gamescom, the Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami was asked which game of his he would like to revisit if given the chance, and his answer was fairly unusual.
He seemed to shoot down the possibility of revisiting Dino Crisis — the winner of a recent Capcom survey on the subject — questioning whether there was "space" for the game to make a comeback given the success of Monster Hunter. Instead, he picked Sweet Home as a game that he'd like to remake — a licensed Famicom title from 1989 that he wasn't actually involved with but that later went on to inspire the Resident Evil series where Mikami obviously played a huge part.
Speaking to Eurogamer's Ed Nightingale and his friend and Shadows of the Damned collaborator Goichi Suda (better known as Suda51) at the event, Mikami told the pair, "Once I make a game, I really don't want to do it over again. So there's nothing that I'd like to remake out of games I made myself, but there's a game called Sweet Home that was actually made by somebody else. Since it wasn't something that I made myself, I'd be interested in doing a remake of that. But as far as stuff that I made myself, I don't want to bother revisiting it again."
Sweet Home, in case you've somehow never heard the story before, was directed by Tokuro Fujiwara - Mikami's mentor at Capcom and the eventual producer on Resident Evil. It saw players take control of a group of characters, each equipped with their own unique abilities, as they explored an old mansion filled with supernatural monsters, in search of the precious frescos hidden within. Later on, it ended up being hugely influential on the early development of Resident Evil, with the PS1 title initially being conceived as a remake of Sweet Home.
In a March 2022 interview with Bokeh Game Studio, Mikami said the following about the impact Sweet Home had on him as a creator:
"I really loved Sweet Home. One of the first creators I had worked with at Capcom was Sweet Home’s Director. He was very talented and had this sensitivity to him. I could tell even if I was still a rookie. He would answer my questions. Then, I remember [Tokuro] Fujiwara calling me for a meeting a few years later. He told me how Sweet Home’s system was good, but that the game didn’t perform well. We wanted to try again to push that game system onto a horror game. I truly enjoyed Sweet Home, so I completely agreed with him. I was honored I could work on that."
"It was a system that wouldn’t make you think of the human. In that system, the various items you held allowed you to progress in the game. It assigned each item to a specific character. A lighter would go to one character, another could have a vacuum, and so on. So you needed your friends, who had your items, in order to clear the game so you had to take good care of them. The point was how to survive in an environment with limitations. In the end, that’s probably the main thing I took. The player has to make a series of choices with limited resources in order to survive. I kept that, then I made something completely different."
Obviously, there are a few things currently preventing Mikami from pursuing a direct remake of Sweet Home, with the main obstacle being licensing. To properly remake the project, he'd need permission from the rights holders of the film and Capcom itself, which could be tricky as he is now working elsewhere at his own company called Kamuy Inc.
Nevertheless, we'd love to see the classic Famicom game get revisited, especially if it could be used as an opportunity to reunite both Fujiwara and Mikami.