Resident Evil Gaiden was officially announced in May 2001 as being under the development of British gaming company M4, Ltd.. They were initially tasked through Virgin Interactive with the development of a Game Boy Color port of Dino Crisis, though Capcom later came to them after finding trouble developing a handheld port of the original Resident Evil with the "HotGen" team, which they soon after cancelled without a publication date. By now, the Dino Crisis port was altered to become an original Resident Evil title, after M4 explained that direct handheld ports of console games wouldn't work. As an original game, Capcom provided Shinji Mikami and Hiroki Kato to plan the game's story out.