In a 2020 interview conducted by the YouTube channel Archipel with series creator Shinji Mikami, he stated that Dino Crisis was not a project he had first created. There was a team within Capcom that was working on original projects, when one day the team's leaders suddenly quit working at the company, leaving the rest behind. They came to Mikami with a pitch for a game with a 3-4 member party system (which Mikami likened to a Dragon Quest game) and asked him what they should do now. In response, he took them under his wing and told them to do their best.

Mikami's team initially brainstormed ideas together, but after struggling to find any good ideas, he asked each individual member to come up with their own ideas so they could decide on which one was the best to pick. At that point, someone from Capcom's graphics department had an idea for a game that took place in a locale similar to Skull Island from the 1933 film "King Kong". Mikami thought that idea was new; there were not that many creatures inhabiting the island, but the only kind was dinosaurs, so they stuck to dinosaurs and applied a gameplay and camera system similar to the first three Resident Evil games to make what would become Dino Crisis.