To many of us playing and writing about video games in the 1990s, Resident Evil seemed to come out of nowhere. The emerging PlayStation and Saturn consoles were all about slick, bright arcade conversions – the shiny thrills of Daytona and Tekken – and Japanese publisher Capcom was in a rut of coin-op conversions and endless sequels to Street Fighter and Mega Man. Scary games were rare at the time and mostly confined to the PC. So when the news of a horror title named Biohazard (the Japanese name for the series) started to emerge in 1995, it caught the attention of games journalists as it seemed radically out of step with prevailing trends. Games were about power, but as early demos quickly revealed, Resident Evil was about vulnerability.
Thirty years later, it’s still here. The series has sold more than 180m copies worldwide, with 11 core titles and dozens of spinoffs and remakes, as well as film, television and anime tie-ins. Its characters and monsters are icons, its tropes now embedded in game design practice. What has allowed it to not only survive but flourish in such a rapidly changing industry? Why do we still let it scare us?
Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village. Photograph: undefined/Capcom
It’s important to understand that Resident Evil didn’t in fact spring out of nowhere. It had a source. In 1989, Capcom released a role-playing game entitled, Sweet Home on the Famicom, the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was about a group of film-makers searching a haunted mansion for valuable artefacts owned by a mysterious artist. The game was a modest domestic success but never received an international release. And yet one senior producer at Capcom couldn’t let it go.
“We have Tokuro Fujiwara to thank for the existence of Resident Evil,” says Alex Aniel, author of acclaimed Resident Evil history book Itchy, Tasty. “He directed Sweet Home having believed that horror could become its own game genre, but wasn’t satisfied with its rudimentary portrayal. He wanted to give horror another try once the technology was there to allow it – that opportunity finally arrived with the release of the original PlayStation.”
In 1993, a young producer named Shinji Mikami was brought in to oversee a horror game project inspired by Sweet Home. He took the haunted mansion concept, but drew influence from George A Romero’s Dead trilogy, as well as the 1992 Infogrames horror adventure Alone in the Dark, imagining a mansion haunted not by ghouls but by zombies, mutants and monsters. The heroes would be an experienced Swat team investigating disappearances at a rural mansion owned by a sinister scientific organisation: Umbrella Corp.
Where it all began … the original Resident Evil. Photograph: Capcom
The original idea was to create the game entirely in real-time 3D visuals, but it became clear the PlayStation hardware couldn’t cope with that level of visual processing. Mikami and programmer Yasuhiro Anpo decided to compromise, combining 3D characters with prerendered 2D backgrounds viewed from a range of fixed camera angles. This restricted, expressionistic style emphasised the intense claustrophobia of the environment. As lead characters Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield explore the creaking hallways and decaying rooms, information is always kept from the player by blind corners and shadowy doorways.
This combination of tension, omission and restriction is one of the fundamental reasons why Resident Evil has survived as a horror franchise. Even after the camera moved to an over-the-shoulder view in Resi 4 and then a first-person perspective in Resident Evil 7, characters are always vulnerable. Ammo, save points and health items are jealously rationed, the inventory is extremely restricted. In this way, Resident Evil operates more like a classic horror text than a power fantasy video game. Characters are victims attempting to navigate a world of unimaginable peril with whatever tools they can find. And this means that when we finally defeat Dr Salvador, Mr X or Queen Leech, the victory is profoundly emotional.
Resident Evil has also expertly referenced horror conventions and paid its dues to its inspirations. Romero is there of course, but so are many other movies. “Kamiya’s biggest source of inspiration came from Alien and especially its sequel, Aliens,” says Aniel of Hideki Kamiya, the famed designer who directed Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil Zero. “For example, in Resident Evil 2, humans infected with the G-virus grow a parasite that eventually ruptures their host and emerges from within, growing into deadly creatures.” Elsewhere, both Resident Evil 4, set in a diseased Spanish village, and Resident Evil 7, placed in the woozy swamplands of Louisiana, refer heavily to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with their incestuous families of psychotic, cannibalistic murderers. Spotting these references is an abiding joy.
But Resident Evil also flits deftly between horror genres, never becoming passe, always keeping pace with cultural mores. There is gothic horror in its crumbling mansions, monstrous enemies and imperilled young women; there is sci-fi horror in its nightmarish biological experiments; there is folk horror in the game’s sinister villages and weird religious cults. In this way, it contains the full spectrum of human fears, from monsters lurking in the darkness to hysteria, bodily degradation, death and undeath. Whatever horrors we see in society, Resident Evil can mirror them – a fact that came into sharp focus in March 2020. “The Covid pandemic reminded us just how real our fear of viruses should be,” says Bernard Perron, a professor of cinema and video games at the University of Montreal and author of The World of Scary Video Games. “In that sense, the fear of a corrupt corporation like Umbrella, along with mad scientists who do not necessarily have humanity’s best interests at heart, continues to resonate. These anxieties remain deeply embedded in our posthumanist societies.”
Cinematic inspiration … Resident Evil 4 remake. Photograph: undefined/Capcom
As with all great horror, Resident Evil continually mutates and reinvents itself. But like Scream and Halloween, it has strong returning characters who keep players focused and engaged. Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, Leon Kennedy – they’re relatable but cool, they spout wry jokes like Hollywood heroes. We know they’ll enter a mansion, castle or lab and monsters of exhilarating threat will attack them – we know that behind the chaos will be charismatic antagonists such as Albert Wesker, Lord Osmund Saddler and Lady Dimitrescu. (Incidentally, it’s interesting how many of the game’s arch-rivals have been aristocrats – Resi is about class-based horror, too.) We know Umbrella will be involved somehow; the conspiracy always goes right to the top.
And this is another reason for its survival. In Resident Evil, the horrors only gradually reveal themselves, like the unfurling leaves of some revolting carnivorous plant. Take the latest incarnation, Resident Evil Requiem: rookie FBI officer Grace Ashcroft spends time exploring before facing any real peril. You are dragged in carefully. “The series offers deep and entertaining gameplay experiences, but with a very low barrier to entry, even for newcomers,” says Aniel. “The Resident Evil games are more accessible than ever: since they are often on sale, they are affordable even for customers in emerging global markets, available on every major game platform.”
Pacing and structure play a role here, too. Resident Evil always subtly delineates between exploration, puzzle-solving and combat sections, giving us moments to breathe and relax. The locations are filled with beautiful details – lavish furniture, eerie oil paintings, ornate gardens – so it is pleasurable to explore, to drink it all in. After fraught battles, we can retreat to safe spaces, such as Save Rooms; we can visit merchants and spend our money on new weapons. On the fragile facade of power, Resident Evil is a series full of illusions. It constantly plays tricks on us, undermining our sense of what is real or imagined.
You know what you will get, but you also don’t know. Around every corner there could be a shock or there could be nothing – it’s the uncertainty that gets you. It allows us to write in our own fears and anxieties, or to discover new ones we hadn’t considered or acknowledged. Like all great horror fiction, Resident Evil has survived because it looks us right in the eye and says, I know what scares you. Come and see.