West Mansion exists because somebody went looking for a good Splatterhouse website and discovered there basically wasn’t one. So in June 2001, Rob built it himself.
That decision turned into one of those fan projects that outlived entire eras of the Web. The site has moved hosts, survived the shutdown of IGN’s hosted-site network, spent roughly a decade archived, reopened in 2021 and was still being updated in 2026.
More Than a Game List
The obvious material is here: the original arcade game, the TurboGrafx-16 and PC Engine versions, Splatterhouse 2 and 3, Wanpaku Graffiti, the 2010 reboot and other releases.
But the better reason to explore West Mansion is the material around the games.
There are character pages, screenshots, weapons, codes, music, interviews, artwork, fan fiction, emulation notes, trivia and sections devoted to fan-made games and ROM hacks. The site even maintains a “Graveyard” for fan projects that disappeared or died during development.
That graveyard is particularly good preservation work. Abandoned fan games normally vanish twice: first when development stops, then again when the old forum, host or download link disappears. West Mansion records names, creators and what survived. In some cases it preserves beta builds with permission.
A Fan Site Became the Historical Record
The site’s own history says it first appeared on GeoCities before moving to Classicgaming in 2001. When IGN’s hosted sites shut down in 2009, West Mansion relocated again. In 2011 it was archived due to burnout and personal circumstances, then officially reopened on Halloween 2021.
That hosting history is almost as interesting as the game history.
Fan sites were often the only places documenting obscure versions, regional differences, cancelled projects and community creations. When those sites disappeared, search engines did not magically preserve the knowledge somewhere else.
West Mansion survived long enough to become an archive of the culture that formed around Splatterhouse as well as the games themselves.
There is a lesson for modern webmasters in that. A small site does not need millions of visitors to become important. It needs a subject nobody else is documenting as thoroughly, enough stubbornness to survive host migrations, and files that remain understandable ten or twenty years later.
West Mansion managed all three.