Resident Evil (1996 video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Resident Evil, the 1996 survival horror game from Capcom for the PlayStation, was never expected to become a hit. Its producer, Tokuro Fujiwara, said it was aimed at a core audience, and he thought it would sell only around 200,000 copies. Lead programmer Yasuhiro Anpo later said that Capcom did not expect it to succeed. Even its director, Shinji Mikami, admitted to being a little worried about how a horror game would sell. Then the game went on to sell millions. How did a project that Capcom's own people doubted turn into one still discussed today? Where did its ideas come from, and which of them were dropped along the way? Why did the same game look and sound so different in Japan, North America and Europe? And what did it do to the way later stories treat the walking dead?

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• 2. Inside the Mansion

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  Chris Redfield can carry six items at once, while Jill Valentine can carry eight. At the start, the player picks one of the two, and that choice changes the whole game. Chris has more health and handles heavy weapons better. Jill starts with a lockpick that opens several locked doors, for which Chris must find keys.

  Both heroes begin with only a survival knife and a Beretta M92FS. Other guns turn up, including a Remington Model 870 and a Colt Python. Ammunition is so limited, however, that the player cannot shoot everything that moves. Zombies and other monsters attack on sight. The player steers with tank controls while fixed camera angles frame backgrounds that were rendered in advance.

  An electrocardiogram on the inventory screen shows how much damage the player has taken. Herbs and first aid sprays restore health, and two herbs can be combined into a stronger one. Dying sends the player back to the last save. Saving costs an ink ribbon, spent at a typewriter in a safe room. Those rooms also hold item boxes where spare gear can be left.

  Rebecca Chambers, a field medic, accompanies Chris, while Barry Burton, a weapons specialist, accompanies Jill. Depending on what the player does, a partner can die or stay alive to the end. The endings change according to whether the partner and the other playable character are saved and escape together. The Spencer Mansion holds answers about why they are there, and those answers are darker than a missing team.

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• 3. The Arklay Incident

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  On the 24th of July 1998, Bravo Team of the Raccoon City Special Tactics and Rescue Service went into the Arklay forest. S.T.A.R.S., as the unit is known, was investigating a string of cannibalistic murders in a fictional mountain region of the Midwest. Contact with Bravo Team was lost, so Alpha Team went after it. Alpha Team consisted of Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, Joseph Frost, Brad Vickers and their captain, Albert Wesker.

  Alpha Team found Bravo Team's helicopter crashed in the forest, with the pilot, Kevin Dooley, dead at the scene. A pack of ravenous Dobermanns then attacked. Joseph was mauled to death, and Brad fled in the team's own helicopter. The others ran from the dogs and took shelter in a mysterious mansion.

  One member of Alpha Team never makes it inside. That is Barry in Chris's story and Chris in Jill's story. The cut-off hero follows noises toward the west wing and finds Kenneth J. Sullivan of Bravo Team being eaten by a zombie. Wesker then vanishes, along with Jill in Chris's story, and the player is left alone.

  Bravo Team's fate emerges room by room. Forest Speyer was pecked to death by infected crows. Richard Aiken died of venom after a bite from Yawn, a giant mutated snake. Captain Enrico Marini was shot in the torso by an unseen person just after revealing that S.T.A.R.S. had a mole. Only the field medic Rebecca Chambers survives, and Chris rescues her.

  The mansion turns out to be a research facility of Umbrella, a pharmaceutical corporation secretly producing Bio Organic Weapons. The murders came from an outbreak of the Tyrant Virus, or t-Virus, which turns any species it infects into flesh-eating zombies. In a laboratory beneath the mansion, the player learns that Wesker is the mole, an Umbrella employee placed inside S.T.A.R.S. He also blackmailed Barry into helping him by threatening Barry's family. If Barry survives, he turns on Wesker once he learns the threat was a bluff.

  Wesker releases a prototype Tyrant, a super soldier he calls the ultimate bio-weapon, after the survivors mock it as a failure. His plan backfires, because the creature kills him first and then turns on the player, who defeats it. A set of MO disks scattered around the mansion lets the player free the other playable character from a holding cell. If the partner is alive, the mansion's self-destruct sequence starts, and the survivors head for a helipad. There they fire a flare to signal Brad, who is still circling in his helicopter.

  The Tyrant ambushes the group again, and it falls only when Brad drops a rocket launcher. A partner who died leaves the self-destruct sequence off, so the mansion stands and the Tyrant roams the wilderness. A hero left in the cell is presumed dead. In the canonical version, Chris, Jill, Barry and Rebecca all survive and the mansion is destroyed.

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• 4. Haunted House Inheritance

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  Sweet Home, a Capcom horror game from 1989, was the seed of Resident Evil. It was itself a video game adaptation of a Japanese horror film of the same name. Fujiwara had created it, and he proposed a new haunted mansion game to Mikami, his former student. Fujiwara said the basic idea was to do the things he could not include in Sweet Home, mainly in graphics. He added that he was confident horror games could become a genre in themselves.

  Mikami was initially reluctant because he hated being scared. Fujiwara gave him the job anyway, because Mikami "understood what's frightening." Mikami's team went on to become part of Capcom Production Studio 4.

  The borrowing from Sweet Home was extensive. Resident Evil took over its mansion setting, its puzzles and its door loading screen. Scattered notes and diary entries told the story in both games. Both used death animations, backtracking to earlier rooms and an intricate mansion layout. Each hero in Sweet Home also carried a personal item such as a lighter, and the imagery was brutally horrific.

  Kenichi Iwao, a scenario writer, traced the limited ammunition to an MSX port of Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress. That game rationed supplies in its randomized dungeons, and the idea carried over. Iwao also wanted mines and traps for fighting zombies, but the schedule did not allow it.

  The look of the rooms came from cinema. Several pre-rendered backdrops in the mansion took cues from the Overlook Hotel in the 1980 film The Shining. Mikami also named the 1978 film Dawn of the Dead as a negative inspiration. Where that film pointed him was a question the first prototype tried to answer.

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• 5. Three Years of Redesign

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  Production began in 1993, and the game took three years to build. For the first six months, Mikami worked alone, sketching concepts, designing characters and writing more than 40 pages of script. The project was first planned for the Super NES. Koji Oda, who had worked on Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts in 1991, was on that version. He revealed that its setting was originally a hellish place, before it was changed to a more realistic one.

  In 1994 the work moved to the PlayStation. The team then imagined a fully 3D, first-person game with shooting. A prototype was built in a supernatural, psychological Japanese horror style like Sweet Home. The team then switched to an American zombie style influenced by the films of George A. Romero.

  Mikami then discovered Alone in the Dark, from 1992, and it pushed him toward a cinematic fixed camera. He said that without it, Resident Evil would have been first-person. He feared the fixed view would leave players feeling a bit detached. Pre-rendered backdrops, however, allowed more detail than his 3D prototype, which "didn't get along so well with the original PlayStation's specs." A first-person view did not return to the mainline series until Resident Evil 7: Biohazard in 2017.

  A later prototype added cooperative play, and early footage of it was shown in 1995. Mikami dropped it because it "technically...wasn't good enough." A demo for the 1995 V Jump Festival in Japan had real-time weapon changing but no co-op. Neither feature returned to the mainline series until Resident Evil 5 in 2009.

  An early 1996 preview in Maximum Console magazine showed a graveyard and a slightly different final boss. The graveyard was cut, though it reached the 2002 remake. Guest houses and a tower survived late in development, then became the guard house and the lab. Two pre-production characters were replaced as well. Dewey was a comic relief role, and Gelzer was a big cyborg strongman. Rebecca and Barry took their places.

  Capcom used no motion capture, even though it owned a studio for it. Animators studied books and videos of how people, spiders and other animals move. Almost all the work was done on Silicon Graphics hardware with the program Softimage. The team grew to upwards of 80 people near the end. Capcom's Akio Sakai said the company hesitated to port the game to the Saturn, since that console suited it less than the PlayStation.

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• 6. A New Name

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  Bio Hazard was the name on the Japanese box, and it could not survive the trip abroad. Chris Kramer, Capcom's director of communications, pointed out that it could not be trademarked in the United States. The 1992 video game Bio-Hazard Battle and a New York alternative metal band called Biohazard already used it. Capcom ran an internal contest, and Resident Evil won because the game takes place in a mansion. Kramer thought the name "was super-cheesy... but the rest of the marketing crew loved it and were ultimately able to convince Capcom Japan and Mikami-san that the name fit." Bill Sienkiewicz painted the cover art for the American and European releases.

  The live-action video sequences were filmed in Japan with American actors, including Charlie Kraslavsky as Chris and Inez Jesionowski as Jill. Even Japanese releases used English voice acting, recorded in a Tokyo studio, with Japanese captions. Lynn Harris, who voiced Rebecca and directed the performances, aimed for camp. She took loose inspiration from Dawn of the Dead, The Blob and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  Japanese voice performances were recorded as well, but Mikami found them inadequate and left them unused. Anpo later said the all-Japanese staff did not realize how poor the localization was. In his view it hindered realism and immersion for the international release, and that was one reason for the new voice recording in the 2002 remake. The original Japanese PlayStation version also had a vocal ending theme by the rock artist Fumitaka Fuchigami, found in no other version.

  The Western editions were edited. The intro lost shots of mangled corpses, a "Cerberus" zombie dog being shot, Joseph's death and Kenneth's severed head. Scenes of Chris smoking a cigarette were cut as well. Even so, the game became one of the first to receive the Mature rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board.

  Inside the game, auto-aiming was disabled and fewer ink ribbons were placed. Capcom also planned to stop item boxes from sharing their contents, so that items could only be retrieved where they were stored. That change appeared in preview copies of the US version but not in the retail release. It resurfaced in the GameCube remake as part of a hidden difficulty setting. Mikami said the American version was made harder at the request of the American staff, so that renters could not finish it in a few days. Capcom's own staff had to play very carefully to complete it.

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• 7. Many Versions

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  The 22nd of March 1996 was the Japanese release date. North America followed on the 1st of April and Europe on the 16th of August. After that, the game was reissued and ported to other systems, often with new features.

  The Windows version arrived in December 1996 and is the only one with all of the uncensored video sequences. Its intro was in full color instead of black and white, and it supported 3D accelerator cards for sharper graphics. It added a MAC-10 for Jill, an FN Minimi for Chris and new outfits for both. GOG.com re-released it on the 26th of June 2024, and it reached Steam on the 1st of April 2026.

  The Sega Saturn version came in July 1997, after a showing at the April 1997 Tokyo Game Show. It added a battle mode with timed rooms graded at the end, and two exclusive enemies, a zombie Wesker and a gold Tyrant. Sega published it in Europe instead of Capcom's usual publisher, Virgin Interactive Entertainment.

  Resident Evil: Director's Cut followed on the PlayStation in September 1997. It was produced to make up for the publicized delay of Resident Evil 2, and it came with a playable demo of that sequel. Its arranged mode moved nearly every vital item and changed enemy placement and camera angles. Zombies moved faster, and Forest Speyer returned as a reanimated zombie. A beginner mode doubled the ammunition that could be found.

  The Western Director's Cut was advertised as uncensored, yet the video was still cut. Capcom Japan handled the localization, and Sony Computer Entertainment America rejected the game over a single line of copyright text. Rather than fix it, Capcom Japan swapped in the cinematics from the American original. Sony approved it and manufactured a full run without Capcom USA knowing the scenes had been cut. Three days after release, the uncensored intro was offered as a free download.

  A third PlayStation version, Director's Cut Dual Shock Ver., co-produced by Keiji Inafune, came in August 1998. It supported the DualShock controller and replaced the original score with a symphonic one credited to Mamoru Samuragochi. In 2014 Samuragochi admitted that he had directed his orchestrator, Takashi Niigaki, to ghostwrite it. The new soundtrack was generally judged inferior, and its ambient theme for the basement was called one of the worst game compositions ever.

  A Game Boy Color port by the studio HotGen was canceled around late 1999 or early 2000 because of poor quality. In January 2012 an anonymous person asked for $2,000 to leak a playable ROM, and the goal was met in February. A near-complete build leaked in 2025.

  The Nintendo DS release, Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, arrived in January 2006 for the series' tenth anniversary. It offered a Classic Mode and a Rebirth Mode with touch-screen knife fights and a puzzle in which the player blows into the microphone to revive a comrade. It supported wireless play for up to four players. In July 2008, Capcom Japan and Yamasa even released PACHI-SLOT biohazard, a slot machine in which a roulette decides each character's fate.

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• 8. Acclaim and Aftershocks

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  A score of 91 out of 100 from eight reviews at Metacritic marks the critical standing of the original PlayStation version. Famitsu scored it 38 out of 40, one of its three highest scores of 1996 alongside Super Mario 64 and Tekken 2. GameSpot called it almost as entertaining to watch as to play. GamePro found the storyline and cinematics "mostly laughable", yet felt the gripping pace made the game terrifying.

  Electronic Gaming Monthly's Mark Lefebvre wrote that the element that really grabs a player is fear. Sushi-X said it may look like a clone of Alone in the Dark at first glance, but is a totally new experience. Next Generation called it as genuinely scary as a good horror film, even while criticizing the dialogue and voice acting. The Windows version drew a more mixed review from Computer Gaming World, whose reviewer admitted it was actually fun after trying to hate it. The Saturn port was praised as an accurate recreation, and critics widely liked its battle mode.

  Sales matched the praise. In Japan the game sold 1.016 million units in 1996, making it the fourth best-selling game of the year behind Pocket Monsters, Tekken 2 and Super Mario RPG. In the United States it passed 1 million copies by early September 1996. In Europe, 230,000 units shipped on the first day, and 21,500 sold in the United Kingdom over the first weekend.

  By December 1997 the game had sold about 4 million units worldwide and grossed more than 200 million dollars. Capcom later reported 2.75 million copies for the original version and 2.33 million for the Director's Cut editions. All PlayStation versions together reached 5.08 million. It became the best-selling PlayStation game at that time. It is also credited with coining the term survival horror.

  Honors followed over the years. Time named it one of the 100 greatest video games in 2012, and it entered the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2024. Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition 2008 also listed it for the worst game dialogue ever.

  In 2013, George A. Romero said that Resident Evil and The House of the Dead, more than anything else, popularised zombies in the early twenty-first century. Alex Garland credited the game as a primary influence on his script for 28 Days Later, released in 2002. Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead, Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead and director Greg Nicotero all named it too. Zombie films, shows and books followed, including Zombieland, World War Z and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The game also helped move zombies from supernatural origins toward scientific explanations.

  The franchise grew into comics, novels, sound dramas, animated sequels and action figures. Its non-canonical films became the highest-grossing film series based on video games. Resident Evil 2 followed in 1998. A GameCube remake arrived in 2002 as part of a deal in which Capcom made three games for Nintendo.

  S. D. Perry's 1998 novelization, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy, merged the Chris and Jill scenarios. It added a new character named Trent, an Umbrella insider, and it moved Raccoon City from the Midwest to Pennsylvania, about an hour's drive from New York.

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