Okay, so the “Jill Sandwich” line from the original Resident Evil is both iconic and ridiculously cheesy. It makes you wonder why Capcom decided to use that, amongst other questionable lines of dialogue. Well, former localisation lead at Capcom’s Osaka offices Tom Shiraiwa has offered up an explanation for Capcom’s thinking.
Speaking with Time Extension regarding his work on Capcom’s titles in the 90’s and 2000’s, Shiraiwa said that unlike other titles that were being localized (which would have his involvement), Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami had the game’s English dialogue recorded at a Tokyo studio. And according to Shiraiwa, the same company who did the recording also worked on the English text.
Shiraiwa’s explanation for this was that Mikami “wanted to be directly involved in the recording session,” but also to give the game a “very Western horror-film kind of atmosphere.”
He added that due to the importance of the project for Mikami, the development team wanted to do everything internally, and were reluctant to use people from overseas. “Their philosophy was that if you use external people, they will not be able to fully convey what they are trying to achieve in the game because they are outsiders.”
The result was that Shiraiwa only submitted a rough translation of the game’s script from Japanese, with Mikami having his own team “punch up” the game’s script. Hence, Jill had her sandwich and Master of Unlocking.
Things of course changed once Resident Evil launched, and the devteam were made aware of the reactions by English-speaking fans to the game’s dialogue. As a result, Resident Evil 2‘s director Hideki Kamiya enlisted Shiraiwa’s help for the dialogue.