Sweet Home on Famicom: The 1989 Capcom Horror Game Behind Resident Evil, and Its Code CAP-EH

Sweet Home went on sale in Japan on 15 December 1989 as a Capcom Famicom cartridge, at 6,500円 before tax, with スウィートホーム on the label. It is the game of a horror film released eleven months earlier, and it is a role-playing game in which five people try to get out of a haunted mansion alive.

It is also the game most often named as the starting point of Resident Evil. That claim is usually told with more certainty than the record supports. What the people involved actually said is narrower, and more interesting, than “Resident Evil began as a Sweet Home remake” — and this guide keeps the two apart.

• Japanese title: スウィートホーム, published by Capcom, based on the 1989 film of the same name
• Famicom cartridge: 15 December 1989 · 6,500円 before tax · catalogue number CAP-EH, printed on the label
• The Resident Evil link, in the makers’ words: Shinji Mikami says his 1993 brief was a horror game using Sweet Home’s system; Capcom’s own web magazine called Sweet Home the prototype of Biohazard
• The part that is media shorthand: “originally a remake” — we found that word only in writers’ narration
• Credits: the box names Jūzō Itami and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. There is no director credit in the game
• Japan only: never released abroad in its time, and never re-released anywhere that we could find
• Buying it: search CAP-EH at Suruga-ya. An English “Sweet Home” cartridge for the NES is a modern reproduction, not a Capcom release

What is Sweet Home, and how does it play?

A five-person television crew goes into the mansion of the late painter Ichirō Mamiya to film his frescoes, and is shut in. Japanese Wikipedia and Hardcore Gaming 101 describe the same core, and it is not what a 1989 role-playing game usually looked like.

You control five people, but a group can hold at most three, so the crew has to split into teams and move through the house separately (Japanese Wikipedia; 1UP). Each character carries one item of their own — Hardcore Gaming 101 lists a lighter, a medical kit, a camera, a vacuum cleaner and a key — and many puzzles need that particular person. Death is permanent. Hardcore Gaming 101 notes that most of those items have substitutes hidden in the house, so losing someone does not make the game unwinnable; it makes it harder. Healing items are limited, and there are five endings, decided by how many of the five get out.

The story is not all told to you. Hardcore Gaming 101 and English Wikipedia both point out that much of it sits in optional diary entries and messages left around the mansion by earlier visitors. You can walk past them and still finish.

How is Sweet Home connected to Resident Evil?

Three people who were there have described the link, and none of them used the word “remake”.

Shinji Mikami, who directed the first Resident Evil (バイオハザード in Japan), has told the same story several times. In 1993 his boss at Capcom’s Osaka studio, Tokuro Fujiwara, asked him to make a horror game “using systems from Sweet Home”, as he put it to GameSpot in 2016. In a 2012 interview with GAME Watch he said the brief was a horror game that used Sweet Home’s system — and that his own contribution was to let the player fight back, because running away in fear with no release was, to him, the part that did not work.

Keiji Inafune, then a Capcom producer, said in Capcom’s own web magazine in 2010 that Sweet Home “later became the prototype” — 原型 — of Biohazard. He said it to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who replied that he had only learned of the connection later, from an acquaintance.

Tokuro Fujiwara himself, asked in an interview with the Japanese magazine CONTINUE whether Biohazard was based on Sweet Home, said yes, and that the basic idea was to do what he had not managed in Sweet Home, mainly in graphics. We have read this only as excerpted on a fan blog, not in the magazine; the issue is given as both Vol. 11 and Vol. 12 in different places, so we do not cite a number.

“Resident Evil began as a remake of Sweet Home” is the version you will read most often in English. We traced it through Hardcore Gaming 101 (the earliest we found, archived in 2009), Computer and Video Games (2011), Game Informer (2016), Den of Geek (2019) and Time Extension (2024). In every case it is the writer’s own narration, not a quote. It is a reasonable shorthand for “a new game built on Sweet Home’s system”, but it is not what anyone involved is on record as saying.

Critics usually list the same shared features. 1UP points to both games starting with a group reaching an old mansion, and to the way Sweet Home makes you manage who carries what. Den of Geek names the mansion, the multiple endings and the item management. Hardcore Gaming 101 puts it as character preservation and item management. That list is critics’ comparison, not Capcom’s.

One more thing Mikami said is on the record. In a 2024 interview with Eurogamer, asked what he would remake, he said nothing of his own — but that there was a game called Sweet Home, “made by somebody else”, that he would be interested in remaking.

Who made Sweet Home, and did Tokuro Fujiwara direct it?

The box and the manual each credit two people on the front: 総指揮：伊丹十三 (executive producer: Jūzō Itami) and 監修：黒沢清 (supervision: Kiyoshi Kurosawa) — the film’s producer and its director. The game’s own end credits, as transcribed by MobyGames, match: Producer Juzo Itami, Supervisor Kiyoshi Kurosawa. There is no director credit. A Tokyo court record adds that Itami Productions commissioned Kurosawa to supervise the Famicom game and paid him for it between February and May 1989 — after the film opened in January.

Tokuro Fujiwara is usually named as the director. Mikami calls it a game “he had directed”, and English Wikipedia lists him that way. In the credits he appears only under Special Thanks, as “Arthur King”; that this is Fujiwara rests on Japanese Wikipedia alone. Fujiwara was later the producer on Resident Evil, according to Game Informer and Wikipedia.

Why has Sweet Home never been re-released?

It has never been re-released: no port, compilation or download turned up in any list we checked. Those are Wikipedia’s lists of Capcom games and of Virtual Console and Classic Mini titles; the Wii’s Japanese Virtual Console list and the Nintendo Switch Online list would not load for us, so treat this as “none found”, not as proof.

The reason is often said to be the film’s rights. We could not find anyone at Capcom, or anyone involved with the film, saying so on the record; it is an inference writers and fans make. Le Monde (2014) and TheGamer (2021) say Capcom did not have the film’s rights when it made Resident Evil, which is about Resident Evil’s setting rather than about re-releasing Sweet Home. Time Extension (2024) says a remake would need the rights holders’ permission. A Japanese fan wiki hedges it as “perhaps partly because”.

What the court records do show is who held what on the film’s side. Itami Productions paid Kurosawa to supervise the game and licensed the film’s video rights to Toho. The film’s director later sued Itami Productions and Toho, arguing that his screenplay contract had not covered video release and television broadcast. The Tokyo District Court dismissed the claims on 31 July 1995, and the Tokyo High Court dismissed the appeal on 13 July 1998. The judgment does not discuss the game’s rights at all.

What happened to the film?

The film Sweet Home opened on 21 January 1989 in 166 cinemas, according to the 1995 judgment, and Suruga-ya lists its programme with the same date. Toho released it on VHS on 1 September 1989 (the judgment and Suruga-ya agree), and on LaserDisc on 21 November 1989 (Japanese Wikipedia and Suruga-ya).

Cinema Today reported in 2014 that it had still not been released on DVD, and Reactor wrote in 2026 that it has never had an official home release beyond that VHS and LaserDisc — you cannot legally stream it, rent it or buy it digitally. Both are media reports; we have not found a statement from the rights holders. So a DVD of the film is, as far as anyone has reported, not an official release. On 25 September 2026 the one DVD we found on eBay was described by its seller as a DVD-R with English subtitles.

Was Sweet Home ever released outside Japan?

No. 1UP (2012), Game Informer (2016) and Hardcore Gaming 101 all say it never left Japan. We found no statement from Capcom on why; the reasons usually given, from the imagery to Nintendo of America’s content rules, are writers’ guesses.

An English fan translation patch, by Gaijin Productions and Suicidal Translations, was released on 15 June 2000, according to the fan-run database Romhacking.net. It is a patch, not a product. But Game Informer reported in 2016 that copies of the translated game were being sold on real NES cartridges through grey-market sites, and that is still true: on 25 September 2026 the top eBay result for Sweet Home NES was an English cartridge its seller described as “Modern Manufacture”.

How do you tell an original cartridge from a reproduction?

As far as any source we found records, Capcom released Sweet Home only as a Japanese Famicom cartridge. Any Sweet Home cartridge whose game text is in English, or that is shaped for the NES, is a modern reproduction of the fan translation. Do not go by Latin letters on the label: the original’s front label carries CAP-EH in Latin letters too.

• The game text: the original’s messages and dialogue are in Japanese. English dialogue means the fan translation
• The shape: a Famicom cartridge has 60 pins and does not fit a North American or European NES without an adapter. A cartridge that slots straight into an NES is not the 1989 release
• The listing words: sellers of reproductions usually say so — “repro”, “reproduction”, “English translation”, “modern manufacture”. Replacement boxes exist too: on eBay we found an empty “Sweet Home” box made in Thailand, listed as a reproduction

To find the code on an original, look at the front label: CAP-EH is printed in its top-left corner, above the red title スウィートホーム, with 任天堂 ファミリーコンピュータ in the top-right corner. We checked this on the NES Cart Database’s scan and on photos from two separate eBay listings.

If you are buying in person in Japan, you can show this line to the staff: これは1989年のオリジナル版ですか？ — “Is this the original 1989 version?”

How do you search each shop for it?

Suruga-ya: the code, in the game category. CAP-EH shows results: 2 in the default view and 8 with sold-out items shown, all of them this cartridge; CAPEH without the hyphen returns the same. With sold-out shown, the Japanese title スウィートホーム shows results: 16 (this game or a part of it: 13); the others include a Nintendo DS game, チーズスイートホーム, and a PlayStation 4 game called HOME SWEET HOME. Keep the game category on: across the whole store the title also returns the film’s VHS and LaserDisc, its soundtrack and several unrelated comics, and CAP-EH picks up earphones and imported CDs.

Buyee: the title plus the word for Famicom. スウィートホーム ファミコン showed results: 63 (the cartridge: 46; the manual alone: 4); the rest were magazines, flyers, multi-game lots and Resident Evil novels. None was the film. The title alone is worse: its results (568) mix the cartridge with a VHS of the film, its programmes and soundtrack CDs. The code does not help on Buyee — CAP-EH showed results: 5 (this game: 3; caps: 2).

eBay: the English title with Famicom. Sweet Home famicom showed exact matches: 33 (the Japanese cartridge: 30). The others included a strategy guide, a lot of film memorabilia with a VHS tape, and a 3D-printed shelf display. The English reproduction cartridge and the reproduction box both appeared below eBay’s “fewer words” line, not in the exact matches. Sweet Home on its own returns more than 38,000 results, mostly homeware and minerals from the Sweet Home mine in Colorado, with the film DVD-R and the reproduction cartridge among them.

Why search Kataban for this one?

Because the code is the cleanest way in at the Japanese shop, and Kataban shows it to you next to the Japanese title. Search CAP-EH or Sweet Home and you get this cartridge. In second-hand game shops in Japan, such as Book-Off, Famicom games are often shelved in Japanese syllabary order, so the section to look in is ス.

Sweet Home · スウィートホーム · Famicom, 15 December 1989 (CAP-EH) · Capcom

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp — the code (CAP-EH) · Buyee — the title plus Famicom (スウィートホーム ファミコン) · eBay — Famicom
See it on Kataban →

On 25 September 2026 Suruga-ya’s main entry for the cartridge showed shop stock from ￥5,200 to ￥23,800 across conditions, and 36 used copies on its marketplace from ￥3,600. The list price was 6,500円 before tax, according to the Media Arts Database and Famitsu’s game page; Suruga-ya shows 定価：￥7,150, which is that price with today’s 10% consumption tax. The cheapest price in the range is not necessarily the best copy; read the condition of each one.

The people who made Resident Evil describe this cartridge as the system they started from. The rest — the remake, the rights — is what has been said about it since. The story carries on in our profile of Noboru Sugimura, the TV screenwriter who, as producer Yoshiki Okamoto tells it, played the first Resident Evil and then told Capcom to throw out Resident Evil 2’s scenario and start again. If you want the 1989 cartridge, look for CAP-EH in the top-left corner of the label, and leave the English NES cartridges for what they are.