Quoted By:
>"Let's make an arcade game inspired by a bunch of violent horror movies."
>"Yeah, how about you play as an escaped mental patient who's chasing this girl through a haunted house, and he has to kill all these monsters to find her and kill her?"
>"Haha, yeah, that's totally wicked, let's put a hockey mask on him too, so it'll be really like the movies!"
>"Nice, we'll have a little intro scene showing him chasing her into the house and everything."
>a long time in development later...
>"Eh, I'm bored with the psycho angle, let's change the premise to something heroic instead; a dweeb and his girlfriend seek shelter from the rain and get caught by the evil monsters in the haunted house, and he has to rescue her."
>"Ok, but it's way late into development, we don't have time to draw all new sprites for the player and shit, it ships soon, it'll be weird if he's still looking like that."
>"Oh fuck, you're right! Uh, I guess we'll say he's knocked unconscious and wakes up in the basement, wearing the mask, and the mask gives him super strength so he can punch monsters into pieces with his bare hands, or something. We can still tweak the intro a bit though, that shouldn't take too much time."
>"A magical hockey mask then?"
>"Yeah, whatever."
>"But he's still wearing the hospital scrubs, and no shoes."
>"Shut up."
Vaguely how I imagine how this went based on what I've learned about the game's development. Funny to me, by the way, is that the first game is arcade, it gets ported to the TurboGfx16, and some home computer, then Splatterhouse 2 and Splatterhouse 3 are on Sega Genesis only (you didn't get the first one on Genesis). As the games go, they change the mask to look less and less like Jason Voorhees' hockey mask, and more skull-like (it was even red in the TurboGfx16 port).