Resident Evil (2002 video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Resident Evil, the 2002 survival horror game that Capcom made for the GameCube, ended its development with an exhausting sprint. Its programmers worked for two straight months with no days off to meet the deadline.

  The game was a remake of the 1996 PlayStation title that began the Resident Evil series. Rebuilding a game only six years old is an unusual bet. Players who knew the original already knew where many of the monsters waited.

  So how do you make a familiar horror story frightening again? What did the team keep, what did they tear out, and who were they building it for? And why did a game that critics loved lead its own makers to steer the series somewhere else?

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• 2. Why Remake It

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  Production began at the start of 2001 under director Shinji Mikami, who had both designed and directed the original game. The work fell to Capcom Production Studio 4, and it grew out of an exclusivity agreement between Capcom and Nintendo. That deal was meant to bring earlier and new Resident Evil games to the GameCube.

  Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and Resident Evil - Code: Veronica had all been simply ported to the console. Mikami chose a different path for the first game. He felt its graphics had not aged well, which made it hard for new players to appreciate.

  Programmer Yasuhiro Anpo named a second reason, the original's poor localization. Mikami and producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi agreed that the GameCube could bring the game closer to the vision the team first had for the series. Capcom's marketing director Todd Thorson summed up the goal as to "achieve motion picture-quality visuals and create even more suspense and fear than the original".

  The project began with only four programmers. Resident Evil was among the first Capcom games made for the GameCube, so the team spent the early stages studying how the system performed. From start to finish, the whole project took one year and two months. One of the earliest decisions was how the world itself would be drawn.

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• 3. Painted Backgrounds, Real Fear

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  The team first considered building every environment with computer graphic animation. They dropped the idea after realizing it would demand too much hardware capacity and processing to look realistic. The remake instead kept the look of the early games, with 3D character models standing in front of pre-rendered backgrounds.

  The camera, however, no longer behaves like a fixed painting. It can track the player from varying angles. The backgrounds also carry particle effects and layers of full motion video, which simulate things such as rushing water or swaying tree branches.

  Fear was a stated priority. Many backgrounds were designed with sharp contrast between dark and light, so enemies could appear without warning.

  The people on screen came from real references. Capcom auditioned actors for the character designers to study, and the faces of the protagonists were based on real people. Motion capture drove about 60 percent of the character movement, while the rest was animated from scratch. The developers first struggled to build a system for computer graphic animation, until Nintendo provided assistance and the problems were solved.

  Capcom also hired new voice actors and rewrote the script to make the plot more convincing. That rewrite opened the door to something larger than a visual upgrade.

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• 4. Surviving the Mansion

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  The inventory in Resident Evil holds a fixed number of items, and the mansion constantly forces hard choices about what to carry. Players often have to carry extras to storage boxes placed in certain areas. The game is played from a third-person view, and the route leads through a mansion and its surrounding grounds. Zombies and giant spiders are among the dangers. The player can open doors, push certain objects, climb obstacles and pick things up. Items can be used, examined and combined, and that is how many puzzles are solved and locked areas opened.

  Ammunition is limited, so the design rewards evasion over fast-paced combat. Health falls when monsters attack. Herbs restore it, and mixing herbs together strengthens the effect. Some monsters inflict poison, which drains health over time until a serum or special herbs cure it.

  Saving is a resource too. Players need ink ribbons and a typewriter, and the supply of ribbons is limited. An automap helps with navigation, and collected maps of particular sections reveal unexplored areas.

  Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine are both playable, and each has strengths. Chris can take and deal more damage. Jill carries more items and can open certain doors with a lock pick. Both can use a defensive weapon, such as a dagger, when a monster seizes them, and each also has a unique one. Jill has a taser, while Chris shoves stun grenades into zombies' mouths and detonates them with a pistol shot. These defensive weapons are limited and work only when the player is grabbed.

  The chosen character slightly alters the story, and certain choices can change the direction of the game and its ending. Finishing under a certain difficulty setting and time limit unlocks secret costumes for the main characters, bonus weapons and special difficulty modes.

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• 5. A Night in July

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  On the 24th of July 1998, a series of bizarre murders occurs on the outskirts of Raccoon City, a fictional Midwestern town. The Raccoon City Police Department sends in its Special Tactics And Rescue Service, known as S.T.A.R.S. Contact with Bravo Team is lost, so Alpha Team goes looking for them.

  Alpha Team finds Bravo Team's crashed helicopter in a forest. A pack of monstrous dogs attacks and kills one member. Pilot Brad Vickers panics and flies away alone. The remaining members, Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Albert Wesker and Barry Burton, retreat into a nearby abandoned mansion and split up.

  Inside, the player character meets the fates of Bravo Team. Kenneth J. Sullivan is devoured alive by a zombie. Richard Aiken is either killed by a giant snake or eaten by a large shark. Forest Speyer is found dead and then reanimates as a zombie. Team leader Enrico Marini warns that a traitor hides among Alpha Team, then is killed by an unseen shooter. Survivor Rebecca Chambers joins Chris.

  The mansion hides illegal experiments carried out by a clandestine research team. They work under the authority of the biomedical company Umbrella Corporation. Creatures roam the halls because personnel and wildlife were exposed to a highly infectious, mutagenic agent called the T-virus.

  Beneath the house lies a secret laboratory. There the player finds Jill or Chris locked in a cell, depending on who they chose, and sees Wesker programming a humanoid bioweapon called a Tyrant. Wesker admits he is a double agent for Umbrella and means to use the Tyrant to kill the S.T.A.R.S. members. In the confrontation he is seemingly killed, and the player defeats the Tyrant. After activating the lab's self-destruct mechanism, the player reaches the heliport and calls Brad for extraction.

  The ending depends on choices at key points. In the best one, Chris, Jill, Barry and Rebecca all escape by helicopter after defeating the Tyrant once more. In the worst, the mansion stays intact and the player character emerges as the sole survivor.

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• 6. Crimson Heads and Other Surprises

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  Zombies that are not beheaded or burned will come back, and the developers designed them to return as more dangerous Crimson Heads. That idea sat alongside many others the team had never planned at the start. Originally they intended only to upgrade the graphics and tweak the gameplay. As the game neared completion, Capcom began making more substantial changes.

  The inventory was expanded so that players could carry a standard item like Jill's lockpick. Defense items were introduced to make the game easier than the original. Several new weapons widened the range of combat approaches, and enemies were rebalanced to match. One idea did not survive. The developers had planned to make all enemies invisible, but dropped it because it would have made the remake too different from the original.

  They added new areas to explore and changed most of the puzzle designs. An additional control scheme lets players move their characters by pressing the R button of the GameCube controller and steer with the analog stick. A new subplot involves the character Lisa Trevor, and it restores an entire storyline that was cut from the original game.

  Even the difficulty menu got a twist. Instead of describing levels with adjectives, Mikami chose to pose unique questions, so that players would pick the hard one.

  In a later interview, Kobayashi said many of these additions and changes were a deliberate effort to attract veteran players.

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• 7. Praise and Complaints

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  Resident Evil reached Japan on the 22nd of March 2002, North America on the 30th of April, Europe on the 13th of September and Australia on the 20th of September. Critics greeted it with acclaim. IGN reviewer Matt Casamassina called it "a triumph as a stand-alone adventure and a major accomplishment as a remake". He also called it "the prettiest, most atmospheric and all-around scariest game we've ever played." GameSpot reviewer Shane Satterfield described it as "one amazing game that clearly stands as the best the series has to offer". Edge magazine said its unforgiving gameplay and technical artistry heightened the tension and anxiety of the original.

  The graphics drew the loudest praise. GameSpot credited the fine detail, realistic gore, volumetric fog and the blending of real-time lighting and shadows with pre-rendered backgrounds. It said Capcom had "finally perfected the art of mixing prerendered scenery with ambient animations and polygonal objects, and the result is the most visually impressive video game ever released." IGN said "close shots of Chris or Jill look almost photo-realistic." Jes Bickham of NGC Magazine found the contrast between models and backgrounds seamless, and wrote that seeing the next area was "an experience to be treasured".

  GameRevolution went so far as to say the game makes the original look like Pong. AllGame reviewer Scott Alan Marriott felt it creates "a constant sense of dread without relying too much on obvious shock values". GameSpot praised the sound design, noting that "there seem to be dozens of sound effects for footsteps alone." Some publications judged the voice acting weak because of its exaggerated delivery.

  The gameplay changes were welcomed even as the controls and inventory management were criticized. Mike Weigand of GamePro wrote, "It's like playing Resident Evil for the first time." GameSpot said the defensive weapons add a new layer of strategy. Critics pointed to a lack of analog precision that the Nintendo 64 version of Resident Evil 2 had offered. Hector Guzman of GameSpy disliked that the original's laborious tank controls, where the stick moves the character in the direction it faces, stayed unchanged. IGN made a similar complaint but welcomed the alternative control schemes.

  GameSpot editors named Resident Evil the best video game of April 2002. At GameSpot's Best and Worst of 2002 awards, it was nominated for Best Story on GameCube, Best Graphics (Technical) on GameCube and Best Action Adventure Game on GameCube. As of November 2003, 445,176 copies had been sold in the United States. In May 2008, Capcom revealed that total sales had reached 1.35 million copies.

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• 8. Afterlife of a Remake

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  Resident Evil 4 arrived in 2005, and from that game onward Mikami and Capcom pushed the series away from survival horror toward action. They made that choice because this remake had sold worse than expected. Before that shift came Resident Evil Zero, a direct prequel built on the same graphics engine and released in late 2002.

  The remake's reputation kept climbing anyway. According to IGN, its graphics "became the new standard by which all future installments in the series would be compared." In 2009, Official Nintendo Magazine ranked it 43rd in a list of greatest Nintendo games. Digital Spy writer Liam Martin called it "the definitive version of a true classic" and said it still looked "fantastic" nearly 13 years after release.

  On the 25th of December 2008, the game was ported to the Wii, alongside Resident Evil Zero, as Resident Evil Archives: Resident Evil. Its controls supported both the Wii Remote and the GameCube controller. Capcom had originally planned no release outside Japan, arguing it would not sell well. The commercial success of Resident Evil 5 changed that, and it reached North America on the 23rd of June 2009, Australia on the 25th of June and Europe on the 26th of June. Reviews were generally favorable, though some publications faulted its outdated controls, lack of new features and lack of widescreen support.

  In January 2015, Resident Evil HD Remaster launched for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. It added 5.1 surround sound, 1080p resolution and a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. The original backgrounds were 4:3, and the developers declined to re-render them in 16:9 because players would see more of each environment than intended, weakening the sense of immersion and danger. Instead they added vertical scrolling that responds to the character's movement. A new control scheme lets players move in the direction of the analog stick.

  The remaster became the PlayStation Network's biggest launch game and Capcom's fastest-selling digital game across North America and Europe. It passed one million copies by April 2015, which led Capcom to announce a similar edition of Resident Evil Zero. Critics noted that the inventory system and the need to revisit explored areas had aged poorly, but generally called it a solid revival. As of September 2022, it had sold 3.7 million copies worldwide across all platforms.

  The two prequel and remake games were also bundled as Resident Evil: Origins Collection, released on multiple consoles in 2015 and 2016, and on the Nintendo Switch in 2019. Retrospectively, critics and fans regard the 2002 Resident Evil as one of the greatest game remakes ever made.

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