Resident Evil 2

• 1. Introduction

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  Resident Evil 2 is a 1998 survival horror game made and published by Capcom for the PlayStation. Across every platform it reached, it sold more than 6 million copies. That success came from a second attempt. The sequel players bought was not the sequel Capcom first set out to make, and its own producer decided the earlier version had to go. This documentary follows the questions that decision raises. Why did the first version fail? How can one game tell two accounts of the same disaster that contradict each other? And how did a PlayStation game that shipped on discs end up on a Nintendo 64 cartridge?

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• 2. The Abandoned Sequel

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  Work on the sequel began in early 1996, one month after the original Resident Evil was finished. Hideki Kamiya directed a team of about 45 people, mixing newer Capcom employees with more than half of the staff from the first game. Producer Shinji Mikami clashed with Kamiya early on and tried to steer the team with his own ideas. He eventually stepped back into an overseeing role and asked only to see the latest build once a month. The project cost more than $1 million.

  The first public footage appeared at the V Jump Festival in July 1996. Mikami later nicknamed that build Resident Evil 1.5. Its outbreak struck Raccoon City two months after the first game, but Umbrella had already been shut down over its illegal experiments. In place of Claire stood Elza Walker, a college student and motorcycle racer who was vacationing in her hometown. Leon S. Kennedy was already there, much as he would appear in the final game.

  In that version the two heroes never crossed paths, and each had two partners. Leon was helped by police officer Marvin Branagh and a researcher named Linda, an early version of Ada. Elza had Sherry Birkin and a man named John, who later became the gun shop owner Robert Kendo. Artists Isao Ohishi and Ryoji Shimogama drew on real-world models for the cast. Ohishi based Leon on his bloodhound and Annette Birkin on the actress Jodie Foster.

  Mikami promised more monsters in 1996. He said the number of enemies on screen would rise to "around seven or more", to create "the sensation of terror as the monsters swarm around the character". The police station was smaller and more modern. Enemy models used fewer polygons so that crowds could fit on screen, and the music was dynamic. Protective clothes could raise defense and let a hero carry more items.

  Mikami expected everything to come together in the three months before the projected May 1997 release. It did not. The game was scrapped at somewhere between 60 and 80 percent completion. He later said it would not have reached the quality he wanted in time, and that its gameplay and locations were dull.

  Mikami had planned to end the series with this sequel. Supervisor Yoshiki Okamoto disagreed. He found the story too conclusive for any future installment, and he proposed a fictional universe in the manner of Gundam and James Bond, where self-contained stories share common elements. While the team made no progress on the rewrite, Okamoto met the screenwriter Noboru Sugimura, who was enthusiastic about the first game's story. A trial consultation became a commission to write the whole scenario, because Okamoto was impressed by how easily Sugimura solved script problems.

  One basic change turned Elza Walker into Claire Redfield, which tied the plot to the first game. To meet Capcom's sales plan of two million copies, Kamiya wanted a showier, more Hollywood-like presentation. Okamoto did not want to simply impose that direction, so he had Sugimura discuss the revisions with Mikami and the staff. The planners redesigned the game from the ground up. The programmers and other remaining members of the team moved to Resident Evil Director's Cut, which shipped with a playable preview disc of the new sequel. That disc doubled as promotion and as an apology to players for the Director's Cut arriving late.

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• 3. Two Scenarios, Four Runs

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  A lighter and a lockpick are all that separate Leon from Claire in play. Those starting key items are their only mechanical difference, unlike Chris and Jill in the first game, who had different abilities. The real difference lies in the route each one takes. A feature called the "Zapping System" gives each hero different puzzles, plot threads and encounters.

  After the player finishes the "A Scenario" with one protagonist, the "B Scenario" for the other opens. It changes to reflect what happened in the first run. Enemies the player killed stay dead, puzzles stay solved, and hazards the player caused remain. That adds up to four unique playthroughs, two for each character. The system was partly inspired by Back to the Future Part II, a time travel sequel that shows the story of the original film from a different perspective.

  Each protagonist is joined by a support partner who appears in certain scenes and can be played in short segments. The first game also had multiple endings, but here the ending depends only on which of the four scenarios is being played.

  Pressing up on the controller moves a character forward, down reverses, and left and right rotate, whatever the camera shows. These are known as tank controls. A character's health shows in posture and pace. A wounded hero holds their stomach in pain, and one near death limps slowly. Herbs and first aid spray heal injuries.

  Safe rooms hold typewriters, where the player spends ink ribbons to save progress. They also hold item boxes, which are necessary because the heroes can only carry a limited number of items. Limited ammunition forces a choice between fighting and evading.

  After each scenario the game gives a rank based on playtime and on how often the player saved or used special healing items. Higher ranks can unlock extra weapons and costumes. They also open two standalone missions, "The 4th Survivor" and "The To-fu Survivor", in which the player must fight through every enemy using only the default items.

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• 4. A Night In Raccoon City

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  Capcom suggested that the Claire A and Leon B scenarios form the canon version of events, since the other order contradicts them. That path begins on the 30th of September 1998, two months after the first Resident Evil. Most citizens of Raccoon City, a fictional town in the Midwestern Arklay Mountains, have turned into zombies. The cause is the T-virus, a biological weapon secretly developed by the pharmaceutical company Umbrella.

  Leon S. Kennedy is a police officer on his first day of duty. He meets Claire Redfield, a college student searching for her brother Chris. After they are separated, each reaches the Raccoon Police Station and finds most of the department dead. Chris has left town to investigate Umbrella's headquarters in Europe. Claire then meets a girl named Sherry Birkin, who is running from an unknown creature. Leon meets Ada Wong, who says she is looking for her boyfriend John, an Umbrella researcher from Chicago.

  Police Chief Brian Irons had been bribed by Umbrella to hide evidence of its experiments on the outskirts of the city. That evidence included the G-virus, an agent that can mutate a human into the ultimate bioweapon. Umbrella air-dropped a Tyrant called Mr. X into the station to find it, and Leon meets the creature several times. Irons tries to murder Claire but is killed by a G-virus mutant.

  In the sewers, a middle-aged woman fires at Ada, and Leon jumps between them and takes the bullet. She is Annette, wife of William Birkin, the Umbrella scientist who created the G-virus. When a security team came for his work, William injected himself and became a malformed creature. He killed the team, and the T-virus leaked into the city's drinking water. Now he chases his daughter Sherry because of her genetic make-up. Ada learns that Sherry's golden pendant holds a sample of the G-virus.

  In the laboratory, a psychotic Annette tells Leon that Ada is a spy sent to steal the G-virus for an unknown organization. Leon says he trusts Ada. Ada saves him and fights the Tyrant, which falls into a pit of molten metal. She is mortally wounded, and the two confess their love before she stops breathing. William fatally wounds Annette, who tells Claire how to make a vaccine against the mutations caused by an embryo implanted in Sherry.

  Leon and Claire inject Sherry on an emergency escape train, and it saves her life. An unseen figure helps Leon finish the Super Tyrant, and he briefly believes it is Ada. William, grown to gigantic size, is destroyed when the train self-destructs. Leon vows to take down Umbrella, and Claire goes on searching for Chris. Meanwhile, a surviving Umbrella special agent named HUNK completes his mission to retrieve the G-virus.

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• 5. Craft And Sound

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  The Raccoon City Police Station was modeled on the Osaka City Central Public Hall. The team built the principal locations to look more extravagant and artistic, working from photographs of the interiors of Western-style buildings in Japanese cities. The environments were created on SGI O2 computers, and each background took two or three weeks to render. Very little from Resident Evil 1.5 could be reused.

  The finished game places real-time polygonal characters and items over pre-rendered backgrounds, viewed from fixed camera angles. The number of zombies on screen at once was capped at seven. That limit made it possible to spend 450 polygons on each of the comparatively detailed models of Leon and Claire.

  The all-Canadian voice cast was chosen from a roster of ten people per role. Their lines were recorded before the cutscenes were completed. The full-motion videos were then made by filming stop-motion animations of action figures and rendering them into finished pictures with computer graphics tools. Ada is the only main character who never appears in a pre-rendered cutscene, because her model could not be finished in time.

  Regional releases needed changes. The North American version has more violent game over screens, which were removed from the Japanese Biohazard 2. It was also made harder, and so longer to play, than the Japanese version. The aim was to stop short-term rentals from hurting U.S. sales.

  Masami Ueda, Shusaku Uchiyama and Syun Nishigaki composed the music, apart from one track by Naoshi Mizuta. Ueda was lead composer and supplied the motifs. Uchiyama wrote the horror-themed music for investigation and movie scenes. Its underlying theme is desperation. A versatile three-note leitmotif returns in pieces such as "Prologue", "Raccoon City" and "The Third Malformation of G".

  The sound shifts with the setting. The streets of Raccoon City carry militaristic percussion, and the police station has ominous piano underscores. Key story events get orchestral and cinematic pieces, a choice inspired by blockbuster films.

  Two albums followed in January and August 1998. Biohazard 2 Original Soundtrack is the main release. Biohazard 2 Complete Track covers lesser themes and adds an orchestral medley, plus a second CD of sound effects, voice collections and an interview with the sound staff. The New Japan Philharmonic later performed five arrangements in a live concert, and the disc jockey Piston Nishizawa made electronic remixes released as Biohazard 2 Remix: Metamorphoses.

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• 6. Many Platforms

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  The Dual Shock Ver. was the first re-release of Resident Evil 2, and it added support for the PlayStation controller's vibration and analog functions. It also brought a "Rookie" mode, which starts the player with a powerful weapon and infinite ammunition. Its biggest addition was the "Extreme Battle" minigame. There the player, as Leon, Claire, Ada or Chris Redfield, must plant four antivirus bombs around one of three maps while fighting through a gauntlet of enemies with limited supplies.

  The Japanese Dual Shock Ver. includes a "U.S.A. Version" mode that copies the difficulty of the Western releases. Most later ports built on this edition, including the Windows 9x-based PC-CD version Resident Evil 2 Platinum. That version runs in higher resolutions and adds a "Data Gallery" for movies, rough sketches, illustrations and 3D models. The Dreamcast port shows a character's condition in real time on the Visual Memory Unit. Its Japanese edition carries the subtitle Value Plus and a playable demo of Resident Evil - Code: Veronica.

  The Nintendo 64 port reached stores on the 16th of November 1999, and it is one of the few games on that console with full-motion video cutscenes. The PlayStation version used two CD-ROMs of up to 700 MB each. The team fit it onto a 64 MB cartridge by compressing audio and video more aggressively and leaning on the console's strong real-time processing. Angel Studios did the work over twelve months on a budget of $1 million, with nine full-time and one part-time staff. Ten people from Capcom Production Studio 3 and Factor 5 helped.

  That version has extras found nowhere else. These include alternate costumes, a randomizer mode that places items differently on each playthrough, adjustable violence and blood color, and a more responsive control scheme. It also holds 16 new in-game documents called the "Ex Files", written by Tetsuro Oyama. Hidden through the four scenarios, they link the story to other installments, including some not yet released. Chris Hülsbeck, Rudolf Stember and Thomas Engel converted the soundtrack to Dolby Surround. The port lacks Extreme Battle, but in 2018 Eurogamer ranked it among the most ambitious console ports of all time.

  Other versions went less smoothly. A Sega Saturn port was planned around the console's 4 MB RAM cartridge, but technical difficulties ended it in October 1998. In late 1998 Tiger Electronics released a black and white, sprite-based 2.5D version for the Game.com handheld, with only Leon's path and no cutscenes or music. It was the first Resident Evil game on a handheld, and the first rated Teen 13+ by the ESRB. A dot-matrix version for the 99X Games handheld followed in 1999.

  An unfinished build of Resident Evil 1.5 leaked onto the Internet in February 2013. Resident Evil 2 came to GOG.com on the 27th of August 2024, after the first game on the 26th of June and before Resident Evil 3: Nemesis on the 25th of September. Sold individually or in a $24.99 bundle, it arrived on PlayStation 4 and 5 on the 19th of August 2025 and on Steam on the 1st of April 2026.

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• 7. Records And Seizures

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  A live action television commercial for the Japanese market was directed by the zombie film director George A. Romero. It was filmed on location at Lincoln Heights Jail, with Brad Renfro as Leon Kennedy and Adrienne Frantz as Claire Redfield. The marketing budget came to $5 million.

  In Italy, the game reached 100,000 pre-orders. In North America it became the fastest-selling video game to date. More than 380,000 copies sold on the weekend after release. That beat the opening revenue of all but one Hollywood film for the same weekend, and it broke records set by Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario 64. In its first month in the United States it was the best-selling home console game by unit sales.

  After six weeks, global sales topped 3 million copies, with 1.9 million in Japan and over a million in the United States. Weekly Famitsu named it Japan's best-selling game for the first half of 1998, with 2.13 million units. By August 1998, 2,298,814 copies had sold in Japan. According to the NPD Group, it ranked sixth among 1998's best-selling games in the United States by unit sales. At the 1999 Milia festival in Cannes, it won a "Gold" prize for European Union revenues during 1998.

  The original PlayStation version sold 4.96 million copies, the best result for any Resident Evil game on a single platform. By March 1999, about 11 million units of Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 had sold across all versions, including 810,000 copies of the Dual Shock Ver. In the United States, 326,397 copies of the Nintendo 64 version sold. A Chinese PC version sold nearly 300,000 copies, which encouraged Capcom to release another title in that language, Dino Crisis.

  In 1999, Italy temporarily banned the game. The political organization "Movimento Diritti Civili" (Civil Rights Movement) had criticized its realistic depiction of violence. The law enforcement agency Guardia di Finanza seized over 5,500 unsold copies. Sony Computer Entertainment asked for the seizure decree to be re-examined, and the ban was lifted a few months later.

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• 8. Praise And Legacy

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  Its original PlayStation release holds an average score of 93% at GameRankings across 25 reviews. At Metacritic it scores 89 out of 100 for both the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 versions, across 13 reviews. Next Generation called it "the must-own title of the year". The four reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly said almost everything about it was "flawless". IGN's Ricardo Sanchez said it "may have the best sound design yet for a console game". GameSpot's Ryan Mac Donald found it "like a product out of Hollywood".

  Reviewers also named flaws. Sanchez called the inventory system "a pain", and Mac Donald noted that the item boxes are magically interconnected. Some reviewers panned the voice acting, using words such as "cheesy", "terrible" and "barbaric". Sanchez found aiming weapons difficult.

  At the AIAS inaugural Interactive Achievement Awards, it was a finalist for "Console Action Game of the Year" and "Console Adventure Game of the Year". It lost to GoldenEye 007 and Final Fantasy VII. In Electronic Gaming Monthly's 1998 Gamers' Choice Awards it finished second to Metal Gear Solid in both categories it entered. Famitsu later named it the fourth best game on the PlayStation, and Official UK PlayStation Magazine placed it sixth on its list of the 100 best games of all time.

  IGN's Lucas M. Thomas considered it the "trendsetter" for modern zombie media, for popularizing zombie hordes filling city streets. The British sitcom Spaced features it in the episode "Art", where a character hallucinates fighting a zombie invasion. Director Edgar Wright cited that episode as the basis for his zombie comedy film Shaun of the Dead, released in 2004. Gabe Newell of Valve Corporation said it inspired him to take "creepiness and horror" seriously while developing Half-Life.

  Licensed works multiplied. Ted Adams and Kris Oprisko adapted the story into comics in March and June 1998, and a 60-issue Hong Kong comic ran weekly from February 1998 to April 1999. S. D. Perry wrote the novelization Resident Evil: City of the Dead in 1999. Radio Osaka broadcast two radio dramas in early 1999, Chiisana Tōbōsha Sherry and Ikiteita Onna Spy Ada, which continued the stories of Sherry and Ada. The Wii game Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles retold the plot in 2009 as "Memories of a Lost City".

  Capcom announced a remake in August 2015 and revealed it at E3 2018. It reached PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One on the 25th of January 2019. Built on the RE Engine, it replaces the tank controls and fixed camera angles with over-the-shoulder gameplay similar to Resident Evil 4.

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