The History of Sweet Home

A horror film's tie in game that outlived the film, and founded a genre.

Sweet Home reached the Famicom on December 15, 1989, in Japan only, developed and published by Capcom alongside a horror film of the same name. Five documentary filmmakers enter the abandoned mansion of the artist Ichiro Mamiya to film his lost frescos, and the door closes behind them. It is a role-playing game in which characters who die stay dead, and it became, on the record, the main inspiration for Resident Evil.

THE MAKING

A director walks the film set

The game was directed by Tokuro Fujiwara, an arcade maker first, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Commando, Bionic Commando, for whom Sweet Home was one of his first console projects. The film's executive producer Juzo Itami produced the game, and the film's director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, supervised it. Fujiwara toured the film's set to gather ideas for the mansion, and Kurosawa told him not to concern himself with following the movie exactly. Fujiwara took the permission: the game's plot expanded on the film's in ways that were unprecedented for a tie in at the time, though some items he wanted were still cut for clashing with the film's atmosphere, and he worked frustrated by the Famicom's graphics limits throughout.

THE DESIGN

Five people, five tools, no resurrections

Each of the five filmmakers carries one indispensable tool: a camera, a lighter, a medical kit, a lockpick, a vacuum cleaner. They explore the mansion alone or in parties of up to three, switching freely, backtracking as new items open old rooms, in a single intricate layout the retrospectives describe as Metroidvania in shape years before the term settled. Health returns only through tonics scattered in the rooms. Story arrives in cutscenes and in scattered notes and diary entries, a method later games made famous.

Death is the design's spine. A character who dies is dead for the rest of the game; the tools they carried can be replaced by substitutes found near where they fell, and the ending, one of five, depends on who is left alive at the end. Add the quick time events sprung by traps, sudden decisions with fatal wrong answers, and the game reads less like 1989 than like a design document for the next decade of horror.

THE EDITIONS

The versions, documented

Japan · 1989

Famicom, December 15, 1989. Promoted with the film, including in a trailer carried on the film's VHS and LaserDisc releases.

The missing West

Never localized. Critics believe the gruesome imagery discouraged Nintendo's Western branches, and that the low popularity of RPGs in North America at the time counted against it too.

The fan translation · 2000

Fans translated the game into English and released the modified ROM online in 2000, after more than a year of work. Hobbyists have since loaded it onto cartridges sold in grey markets.

Only one edition

There is no remake, no port, and no official release outside Japan in any form. The Famicom cartridge is the whole official history.

THE RECEPTION

Scores, sales, and the dissent

Famitsu · 28 / 40

The release panel scored it 6, 7, 8, 7, praising the unique design and the appropriately atmospheric graphics and sound, while warning the gameplay could be too difficult or tedious for some.

Famicom Hisshoubon · 4 / 5

One reviewer called it the best game of the year, praising the scenario and the fast pace, and the absence of grinding for experience or money.

Famitsu retrospective · 29 / 40

The magazine's 1991 look back at older RPGs scored it 7, 8, 9, 5, praising horror, visuals, and puzzle solving, with length as the main complaint.

Awards · Critics' choice

Sweet Home took a critics' choice award at the 1989 Famitsu Best Hit Game Awards, and contemporary critics generally judged the game better than the film.

The dissent inside the praise is worth keeping: even its admirers found it hard, occasionally tedious, and short. What nobody in 1989 could see was that the game's systems, not its length, were the point.

THE LEGACY

What it left behind

Sweet Home is now considered a landmark, one of the greatest horror games ever made, and the groundwork of the survival horror genre: limited inventory, scattered notes, a mansion as a single puzzle, multiple endings by survival. Game Informer's Ben Reeves called it a cult hit and Fujiwara's most significant contribution to the industry, a game the entire horror genre owes a blood debt. How exactly it became Resident Evil, with Fujiwara producing and Shinji Mikami directing, has its own page in this Library.