Early in development, the game was intended to be titled "BIOHAZARD GUN SURVIVOR: Behind The Mask" as a working title as seen in an early trailer of the game and evident by a leftover texture in the game files, eventually the name was changed to "Biohazard Gun Survivor / Resident Evil Survivor" without the extra subtitle.
The skins for the zombies; zombie dogs and Ivies were copied over from Resident Evil 2 with minimal changes being made from 1998, including the frames of animation. Development of Sheena Island was also performed to a very limited degree; even taking real-time rendering into consideration, the graphical quality was noticeably inferior to Capcom Production Studio 4's 1999 title, Dino Crisis, which also used such a rendering technique. However, the effect of graphic limitations at the time and their effect on first-person perspective games should be taken into account.
While the game was intended to be used with the GunCon light-gun controller, the North American release disallowed this. It was suspected by reviewers to be a Capcom USA, Inc. decision in response to the then-recent Columbine Massacre, which had occurred in April 1999.[1]
BIOHAZARD SURVIVOR appeared at the Autumn 1999 Tokyo Game Show, with limited visible alteration being made beyond that version.[1] The game disk, itself, records changes being made as late as mid-December.