Resident Evil

• 1. Introduction

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  Resident Evil began not as a horror game but as a remake pitch. In 1993, Capcom producer Tokuro Fujiwara handed a directive to a young designer named Shinji Mikami: take the bones of Fujiwara's own 1989 Famicom game, Sweet Home, and build something new. What emerged three years later would sell over 201 million copies, spawn a zombie revival that reshaped popular culture, and earn Capcom its best-selling franchise of all time.

  But before any of that could happen, the game needed a name. And in late 1994, that turned out to be surprisingly difficult. A DOS game had already claimed the title Biohazard, and a New York hardcore punk band held the same name. So Capcom held an internal naming contest. The winning entry was Resident Evil, a phrase that meant almost nothing on its own but would eventually mean everything in horror gaming.

  This is the story of how a mansion full of zombies became a thirty-year franchise, how it taught gamers to dread a fixed camera angle, and how it changed not just video games but horror cinema, zombie fiction, and the way an entire generation learned to be scared.

• 2. The Name and the Genre

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  Resident Evil made its debut on the PlayStation in 1996 and was simultaneously ported to the Sega Saturn. Critics and players had never encountered anything quite like it. The game was the first to be labeled a "survival horror" title, a term coined specifically for the genre it created. GameSpot would later list it as one of the fifteen most influential video games of all time.

  Part of what made the first game so unsettling was a control scheme that came to be known as "tank controls." Players moved their character relative to that character's own facing direction, not relative to the camera. When the character faced toward the camera, all the inputs felt reversed. Some critics argued this was deliberate, that the clumsy controls were engineered to create stress. Others found it simply maddening. Either way, it became one of gaming's most debated design choices.

  The live-action opening cutscene proved controversial for a different reason. It became one of the first action games to earn the "Mature 17+" rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, even though that opening had already been censored for North American audiences. The game was also notable for taking video games in a cinematic direction through its B-movie-style cut-scenes and full-motion video footage.

  The original game sold well enough to prompt two rapid sequels. Resident Evil 2 arrived in 1998 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis in 1999, both for the PlayStation. A port of Resident Evil 2 reached the Nintendo 64, and Windows versions of all three followed. By March 1999, those first two games alone had collectively sold approximately 11 million units worldwide.

• 3. Raccoon City and Its Ghosts

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  Raccoon City is described in the fiction as a metropolis located in the Arklay Mountains of the Midwestern United States. It is not a real place, but it became the gravitational center of the franchise's first decade. The city succumbed to the T-virus and was destroyed by a nuclear missile strike authorized by the United States government. That single catastrophic event served as the hinge on which the early games turned.

  The original game introduces Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Albert Wesker as members of STARS, an elite police unit lured into a derelict mansion. Most of the team is killed. Wesker reveals himself as a double agent for the Umbrella Corporation, the pharmaceutical company secretly developing mutagenic bio-organic weapons. A Tyrant BOW apparently kills him, though the series would revisit that assumption repeatedly.

  Resident Evil 2 brings Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield to the city during the full viral outbreak, while Resident Evil 3: Nemesis follows Jill Valentine through the same nightmare. These three games form a tight narrative cluster, later supplemented by Resident Evil Outbreak, released for the PlayStation 2 in 2003. Outbreak was the first game in the series to feature cooperative gameplay and depicted episodic storylines set during the same period as the second and third entries.

• 4. The Pivot That Changed Everything

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  Resident Evil 4, released in 2005, is remembered as the game that broke the mold the series had built. It replaced fixed camera angles with a tracking camera that followed the player over the shoulder. Critics noted this new viewpoint made the game less immediately frightening, even as it made the action more dynamic. That over-the-shoulder framing would go on to become ubiquitous across action-adventure games industrywide.

  The road to Resident Evil 4 was circuitous. Capcom had initially announced the next mainline entry would appear on the PlayStation 2, a development process that generated enough assets to spin off into a separate game entirely: Devil May Cry. Shinji Mikami then steered the series exclusively to the GameCube, which also received a remake of the original Resident Evil and a prequel, Resident Evil Zero, both in 2002. Resident Evil 4 later expanded to Windows, PlayStation 2, and Wii.

  Ressident Evil 5, released in 2009, became the franchise's best-selling individual game despite mixed fan reception. It introduced cooperative play and the ability to strafe. Resident Evil 6, released in October 2012 to mixed reviews, went further still, letting players move while shooting for the first time and fully abandoning tank controls. Pre-order sales had been enthusiastic, but many fans felt the series had drifted too far from horror.

  By 2013, producer Masachika Kawata publicly acknowledged the tension. He stated that survival horror as a genre would never be on the same financial level as mainstream shooters, but that Capcom needed the confidence to invest in horror anyway and meet what fans actually needed.

• 5. Return to Darkness

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  Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, released in January 2017 for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, marked the most radical reinvention the series had attempted since Resident Evil 4. Built on Capcom's newly developed RE Engine, it shifted to a first-person perspective and placed the player in a dilapidated mansion in Louisiana. The game drew comparisons to modern survival horror titles such as Outlast and PT.

  The first-person approach carried forward into the eighth main installment, Resident Evil Village, released in May 2021. Set in a mysterious European village, Village incorporated more action elements drawn from Resident Evil 4 while retaining the first-person camera. The game also marked the franchise's debut on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, introducing new protagonist Ethan Winters, whose story arc concludes with his self-sacrifice to destroy a weaponized fungal colony and save his family.

  The RE Engine also powered a new wave of remakes. A remake of Resident Evil 2 arrived in 2019 for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One; it outsold the original game within a single year and moved over five million copies. A remake of Resident Evil 3 followed in April 2020. A remake of Resident Evil 4 was released on the 24th of March 2023 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows. In Japan during its first week, the Resident Evil 4 remake sold 89,662 copies on PlayStation 5 and 85,371 on PlayStation 4.

  The ninth main installment, Resident Evil Requiem, was released on the 27th of February 2026, introducing a new protagonist named Grace Ashcroft, whose investigation into a syndrome affecting Raccoon City survivors takes her back into the city's ruins alongside Leon and Sherry.

• 6. Films and the Billion-Dollar Anomaly

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  From 2002 to 2016, six live-action Resident Evil films were produced, all written and produced by Paul W. S. Anderson. The films share some characters with the games but follow an original protagonist, Alice, portrayed by Milla Jovovich. Critics disliked them. Audiences did not care: the series grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide and holds the distinction of being the only video game film adaptations to increase revenue with each successive entry.

  The 2012 Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition named the series as having the most live-action film adaptations of a video game and described it as the most successful movie series based on a video game at that time. By 2012, the Resident Evil film series was the highest-grossing film series based on video games, making Resident Evil the third-highest-grossing video game film series overall as of the time of this writing.

  A reboot, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, was released on the 24th of November 2021, with Johannes Roberts directing. A second reboot entered development with director Zach Cregger, who noted he had never seen any of the previous films and intended to ground his version closely in the games, particularly Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and Resident Evil 4. In March 2025, Sony Pictures won a bidding war for the franchise rights through Columbia Pictures. A release date of the 18th of September 2026 has been set. Filming is scheduled to begin in Prague in November 2025, with Austin Abrams confirmed to star.

  On the television side, a Netflix live-action series premiered on the 14th of July 2022, running eight episodes across two timelines set in 2022 and 2036. It aired for one season.

• 7. The Zombie Revival

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  George A. Romero, in 2013, credited Resident Evil and House of the Dead as the works that, more than anything else, popularized his zombie concept in early 21st-century popular culture. Kim Newman made a similar argument in his 2011 book Nightmare Movies, tracing the zombie revival's origins to the Far East and specifically to the 1996 Japanese releases of Resident Evil and The House of the Dead.

  Screenwriter-director Alex Garland, in a 2015 interview with the Huffington Post, credited the Resident Evil series as a primary influence on his script for 28 Days Later, released in 2002. Edgar Wright cited Resident Evil 2 as a primary influence on Shaun of the Dead, released in 2004, with Simon Pegg also crediting the first game with starting the zombie revival. The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman named Resident Evil as his favorite zombie game. Director Greg Nicotero of The Walking Dead television series credited Resident Evil and House of the Dead with bringing the zombie genre to an entire generation of younger viewers unfamiliar with Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.

  The franchise's contribution went beyond atmosphere. Resident Evil played a notable role in shifting the zombie genre from supernatural explanations toward scientific ones, using viruses and corporate research to account for the undead. That reframing proved durable. The zombie revival peaked across different media through roughly the mid-2010s, eventually cooling in film while remaining commercially robust in video games, as the 2019 success of both the Resident Evil 2 remake and Days Gone demonstrated.

  Nine main installments, four remakes, dozens of spinoffs, a theme restaurant in Tokyo called Biohazard Cafe and Grill S.T.A.R.S., airsoft replicas of in-game firearms, and a franchise that by May 2026 had sold over 201 million copies worldwide: Resident Evil's influence radiates far beyond the survival horror genre it named.