Resident Evil: How the Original Survival Horror Changed My Life & Revolutionized an Industry
Resident Evil the pinnacle of survival horror gaming changed the landscape with its incredibly atmospheric and dark game series. One of our Sabukaru writers examined the history of this game and how the popularity not just influenced him but an entire industry with games and movies like Silent Hill and 28 Days Later:
Advertisement for Resident Evil in Next Generation #17, 1996
It’s rare for a piece of art to not only revolutionize its chosen medium but fundamentally change the way you live your life. Yet, for me, that piece is Resident Evil. A game which, while steeped in nostalgia, and burdened with gaming archaisms - fixed camera angles, 3D polygon graphics, pre-rendered backgrounds - remains as relevant as ever.
Released in 1996 for Sony’s infant PlayStation, the gaming world’s new favourite sibling after Nintendo and Sega’s highly documented console war of the 1980s and early 90s, Resident Evil - published as Biohazard in Japan - marked the beginning of what soon became known as the Survival Horror genre in gaming. A genre that put slow-building tension over excessive excitement and placed the player’s experience as paramount in an industry that generally preferred spectacle over substance.
I am of course writing in superlatives but the point is that no other game at the time made us, the player, the central caveat to the game’s major victory. The way it chilled you to the bone on your first run, then made you feel like an apex zombie hunter in the next; the way it challenged and rewarded players in equal measure; the way it gave the player a real sense of urgency in a relentlessly deadly environment of monsters and madness. This is what made Resident Evil so significant.
And yet, rather than push the scale of video game worlds to be bigger than what had come before - as was generally the case in gaming’s infancy (and arguably remains the case today (just see every iteration of Assassin's Creed since 2007) - developer Capcom, and director Shinji Mikami, acted to go small with Resident Evil; opting for player restriction over liberation, detail over scale, and spine-tingling atmosphere over extravagant world design.
Heavily inspired by the likes of Myst (1993) and Alone in the Dark (1992), Resident Evil was originally conceived as a spiritual sequel to Capcom’s 1989 horror game, Sweet Home, which pits a team of filmmakers to explore a mysterious mansion and gather a series of precious frescos within. Based on the 1988 film of the same name by Cure director, Kyoshi Kurosawa, Sweet Home planted the seeds of the survival horror genre, with an emphasis on inventory management, backtracking, and puzzle-solving. The game was so fundamental to shaping Resident Evil’s development that Sweet Home’s director, and Mikami’s mentor, Tokuro Fujiwara was brought on as the game’s producer, injecting the DNA of his original survival horror into the veins of what was to be Capcom’s landmark title.
Tokuro Fujiwara and Shinji Mikami via Twitter
Sweet Home’s inspiration runs so deep that the game was initially planned as a direct remake of the Famicom (SNES) classic. Yet, since the original game had been based on the aforementioned movie license, of which Capcom no longer had the rights, Mikami and Fujiwara had to come up with a whole new story to constitute its creation, hence the name change to Resident Evil.
Sweet Home
While a heavyweight of the arcade and console industries, Capcom had since fallen on hard times in the lead up to Resident Evil, with the company struggling to adapt to the move from 2D to 3D. Noting the difficulty to stay relevant in an industry evolving at a brisk pace, video game magazine, Next Generation reported, in 1996, that “While a history of rich, playable arcade games precede [Capcom], the Osaka-based company has recently been suffering from the familiar Japanese problem - how to adapt. Negotiating the gargantuan rift that exists between 2D and 3D worlds clearly hasn’t been an easy process for Capcom.”
From the get-go, the pressure was on for Mikami. Not only was he impressed with the goal of creating something that succeeded Capcom’s already iconic plethora of works (Street Fighter, Mega Man) but he also had to make some freakin’ money. All of this while forced to design under the restrictive measures of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Manifesting under Mikami’s sole care for about 6 months of development time - during which he created scores of design concepts and characters, writing over 40 pages of script concurrently - the game was given an unusually long production period, with its later designer Koji Oda revealing in an interview with Game Informer in 2017, that “Typically, games would take half a year and no longer than a year to develop [...]. It’s not that well known, but before Resident Evil went to the PlayStation, I was working on it for the Super NES.” During this time the development team struggled to manage the game’s increasing design needs, constrained by the SNES’s limited hard drive space and minimal processing power (the SNES’s 16-bit microprocessor only ran at 3.58 MHz, while the PlayStation would later blow this out the water with their 32-bit CPU running at upwards of 33 MHz). Oda reminisces about the game’s early development period, explaining:
“This was back before the name Resident Evil had even been assigned to it. The codename for this was literally just ‘horror game.’ On the SNES, we were working with limited hard drive space, so it’s not like we could dump a movie in there. If we had actually completed it on the SNES, I’m sure it would have been considerably different.”
After the decision to move Resident Evil’s development to the PlayStation, Mikami faced a new challenge: bringing the 16-bit foundations laid by Sweet Home to the 32-bit era. Struggling to ascertain how to make the move from 2D to 3D, he came across Alone in the Dark, itself a forebear of the survival horror genre and the proof of concept that 2D pre-rendered backdrops were the way forward for his game’s creation. The game’s influence resulted in Resident Evil’s now-iconic visual style, which thanks to the PlayStation's superior graphical precision, allowed Mikami and team to produce detailed environments for their 3D polygon characters to scour and survive in.
Alone In The Dark
Wanting to captivate a larger audience than the original Sweet Home, Mikami would utilise Western horror films to inspire the cramped hallways and nightmarish atmosphere of Resident Evil. Extracting the claustrophobic anxieties of movies like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and the violent horror of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and injecting raw obscene ideas directly into the veins of the game’s environments. Through tight corridors, fixed camera angles, and an overarching sense of impending doom, Mikami and team curated the fundamentals of what makes a horror film great and realised them in (mostly) 3D to establish the first great horror game. And Resident Evil’s Arklay Mansion is at the heart of it all; a maze of deadly beasts, enigmatic puzzles and unceasing tension. As described by Rich Stanton for Eurogamer in 2016, “the Arklay Mansion [is] the real soul of the game - an uncomfortable, unpredictable atmosphere that penetrates far beyond gunplay.”
Jill attacked by a zombie dog in Resident Evil
Set in the fictional town of Racoon City, the original Resident Evil begins with a live-action short film depicting STARS (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) team, Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, Rebecca Chambers and Albert Wesker, as they venture out in search for the missing alpha team, who’ve recently gone silent while on a mission to investigate a slew of unexplained murders.
After being attacked on-site by a pack of bloodthirsty, rabid dog monsters, our heroes take cover in the seemingly abandoned Arklay Mansion on the outskirts of the city. Once inside the team decide to split up and the player, either Chris or Jill, must explore the mysterious mansion, uncover its sinister secrets and hopefully survive the night. A seemingly cliche plot, even for its time, but one when left in the hands of Mikami and the designers as Capcom, becomes a tense crawl through deadly environments and intricate puzzle-solving.
Resident Evil statue puzzle
And therein lies the core gameplay loop of Resident Evil, exploration, puzzle-solving and survival. With Jill and Chris, as your (mostly) competent avatars, to take you through the ensuing nightmare, divulging via truly terrible dialogue (even in the GameCube remake) the insanity of the situation. I should perhaps elaborate that Resident Evil’s localization efforts were subject to much mockery at the time, with the English voice actors failing to emote on a realistic level and most of the dialogue feeling as if it were straight out of a Niel Breen film.
Throughout its multiple remakes, the game has since been redubbed and polished to avoid alienating new players but the residue of the B-movie storytelling still lingers and has largely become a staple of the franchise. Even in later games such as Resident Evil 7: Biohazard - released as Biohazard 7: Resident Evil in Japan as a callback to the original’s title change - the main character of Ethan Winters maintains a laughable sense of uncertainty when battling a family of bioengineered super zombies; a genetic side effect of the game’s infamously asinine storytelling.
Yawn the giant snake in Resident Evil
Whatever your feelings towards Resident Evil’s shortcomings, the end result is still a masterpiece in game design and suspense; giving players little to no direction and allowing them to tiptoe their way around its superb environments, getting jumped every so often and discovering the maze of the mansion for themselves. The game’s purposeful ambiguity (and hilariously confusing dialogue) encourages the player to piece together the story themselves via scattered notes and sinister clues.
Through exploration and backtracking, players gain a deep understanding of the game’s environment, which when paired with their own personal deciphering of the game’s story, makes the game a uniquely individual experience. This is somewhat aided by the intricate environments, which, while small when compared to the gargantuan worlds of modern games, feel carefully curated and comprehensively designed, allowing players to fully appreciate the complexity of the Arklay Mansion.
The game is super rewarding in this sense, squeezing, in returning to Stanton, “everything it can out of this centrepiece, making players pass through the central atrium countless times, run down the same corridors in different directions, and re-visit rooms long after first finding them.” This ability for detail over scale makes the game incredibly replayable, informing each and every run and making players expert survivalists in the zombie outbreak (at least, within the confines of the game world).
The Arklay Mansion in Resident Evil
So how did this game change my life? Well, for one thing, I can’t venture anywhere without knowing exactly what items I bring with me, and how much space I have for whatever I might pick up along the way. Don’t want to be making too many risky runs to the supermarket when I could manage everything in one efficient trip.
Additionally, I bring this same attitude to everywhere I’ve worked and everything I’ve worked on; scouring endlessly for the best sources to use in my writing and trying to put as much information I can into whatever piece I’m working on. Resident Evil’s inventory management and the sense of achievement you get when you pull off that one successful run - picking up, combining items and getting back to the safe room to use that precious ink ribbon - has altered my very being. I guess, to that end, it shows quite how influential Resident Evil has been to me; as I literally picture the square spaces of Chris or Claire’s item capacity to inform my own decisions.
What’s more, however, is that this influence stretches further than my own predilection for organizational skills as Resident Evil’s effect can be seen throughout the world of gaming; trickling into every horror game since and informing the design choices of many of the genres best titles. Take Visceral Games’ Dead Space (2008), for example, a tight, tense, and terrifying game whose inspirations clearly emanate from that of Capcom’s original survival horror.
With not only a limited inventory space (which upgrades when you purchase new suits) and Resident Evil’s idiosyncratic confined hallways but also its propensity for atmospheric suspense, hair-raising jumpscares, and creepy, deformed, and near-indestructible monsters. And while Dead Space designer, Wright Bagwell insists that their influence comes strictly from Resident Evil 4, since that game is an evolution of the series original, its roots can be determined therein.
“It’s pretty obvious when you play Dead Space, to look at it and go, ‘Yeah, it’s almost like they decided to make Resident Evil 4 in space,’ which is exactly what we were doing”
Dead Space
Another example of Resident Evil’s permeating effect is Konami’s Silent Hill franchise, now-iconic in itself for its suffocating fog effects, cramped hallways and intensely eerie ambience. While many contend that Silent Hill’s (1999) horror works to instil a sense of brooding dread as opposed to Resident Evil’s visceral jump scares and action-centric story beats, it’s of no coincidence that Konami, who at the time was Capcom’s rival company, developed a horror game so shortly into the lifespan of Mikami’s opus. It’s not hard to infer the industry moves here, with video game journalist, Francesca Reyes, pointing out the similarities between the games, lauding Silent Hill for its masterful sound design and its boldness towards “taking a more literary turn into the world of horror” while admitting that it doesn’t quite eclipse the revolutionary feats of Capcom’s flagship franchise.
“...as masterful as Silent Hill is, it still can’t claim perfection. In a completely 3D, polygonal real-time game environment, there are always going to be issues about control. Silent Hill slightly suffers from this”
Silent Hill
And it isn’t only games in which Resident Evil’s impact can be felt as even filmmakers such as Alex Garland have lauded its influence on his works. The most notable example of this being the Danny Boyle helmed zombie flick, 28 Days Later (2002), which like Resident Evil, was pioneering its depiction of zombies (28 Days became the predecessor of so-called “fast zombies”, an evolution of the traditional slow-moving undead from the works of Romero or Sam Raimi). As affirmed by Alex Garland, in an interview with Zaki Hasan, Resident Evil played a huge part in his writing of the script for 28 Days Later:
“I don’t know, probably a year or two before I wrote 28 Days, Resident Evil got released. Sometimes 28 Days Later is credited with reviving the zombie genre in some respect, but actually, I think it was Resident Evil that did it because I remember playing Resident Evil, having not really encountered zombies for quite a while, and thinking: oh, my God, I love zombies! I’d forgotten how much I love zombies. These are awesome!”
Thus, as is the nature of art and imitation, Resident Evil, which was inspired by the classic zombie movies of Romero, inadvertently inspired the game-changing efforts of Boyle and Garland.
Cillian Murphey in 28 Days Later
While we’re on the topic of films, we should probably mention Paul W.S. Anderson’s multi-sequel spanning film “adaptation” of Resident Evil (2002 - 2016). An adaptation in the least sense of the word as the films bear little resemblance to anything regarding the games, bar a few characters, the villainous Umbrella Corporation and the familiar setting of Raccoon City. Deciding to disregard pretty much everything that made Resident Evil great - its tense atmosphere, vulnerable characters and visceral horror - and turn it into an all-out action, sci-fi fuckfest.
Miila Jovovich in Resident Evil (2002)
To be honest, the less said about Anderson’s pentalogy of films the better as not only are they utterly unfaithful to Mikami’s original concepts but they’re just bad movies, period. Milla Jovovich is solid as the gun-toting, wall-running Alice but the rest is just… meh. What’s more interesting, and hopefully better in quality, is the upcoming Resident Evil film reboot, which looks to be taking things a tad more seriously, adapting characters and story elements from the first two games and making a movie that actually feels like it’s sewn from the same seed.
Directed by horror filmmaker, Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, Storage 24) Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is set to be released later this year and from its most recent set photos, appears to be the definitive Resident Evil movie, with accurate costumes, a commitment to the source material, and a move towards a more horror atmosphere. In an interview with IGN, director Roberts claims his version is “all about returning to the games and creating a movie that was much more a horror movie than the sort of sci-fi action of the previous films.” Let’s hope it sources the best parts of the first two games and doesn’t fall too far into the series' notorious corny dialogue and nonsensical storytelling.
Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield and Avan Jogia as Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City courtesy of IGN
Resident Evil, through its fair share of criticism and praise, remains a staple of the survival horror genre. It pioneered the use of 2D backgrounds and player constraint, revelled in its ludicrous storytelling and outrageous voice acting, and while the series has had its ups and downs (the downs generally occurring after the monumental success of Resident Evil 4) it is still the black beating heart of horror gaming. And after finding its feet again with 2017’s Biohazard and its subsequent sequel, Resident Evil 8: Village, it seems Capcom has remembered what made the franchise great in the first place, bringing the best parts of the survival horror into the present and scaring the wits out of its players accordingly.
About The Author
Simon Jenner explores meaningful storytelling through film and media, occasionally producing a little writing along the way.
