Whether you’re a fan of the series or not, there’s undoubtedly no argument that Resident Evil helped redefine videogames in the mid-Nineties and propelled the Sony PlayStation into a more mature demographic. Open and tense locations, limited ammunition, a mysterious corporation, oblique puzzles and, of course, those shambling undead corpses all contributed massively to a successful regeneration of the survival horror genre. And back in 1996, we didn’t seem to mind the tank controls and those painful door animations. This was a frightening experience like no other. “I remember walking into a lot of walls!” smiles Alex Moore, designer on Firesprite’s brutal VR survival horror game, The Persistence. “The controls and camera suited the game at the time, but they were a high skill floor for players to learn.”
While it retained the tank controls and prerendered backdrops, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis included a few nods to a new direction. Much of the original game’s anxious skulking of tight corridors was gone, as was the laborious trudging across the map to find a specific item. Instead, we got the mutated Nemesis, stalking Jill Valentine with a rough gargled exhortation of “STARS” as the series took a notable move towards action-based gameplay. Then, with further advances arriving with the Sega Dreamcast game Resident Evil – Code: Veronica in 2000, Capcom’s decision to publish a remake of the original game on the Nintendo GameCube pointed the way to a new beginning.
ALEX MOORE
“Looking at Resident Evil now, I think it’s earned its place in gaming history,” says Alex Aniel, author of Itchy, Tasty: The Unofficial History Of Resident Evil. “But it was superseded by the legendary GameCube remake.”
Yet despite its status today, the GameCube remake of , and its companion,, were disappointing sellers for Capcom, the exclusivity to the Nintendo console harming it in the face of the incredible success of the PlayStation 2. As Alex Aniel notes in , “It is likely that there would have been a drop, albeit smaller, on PlayStation 2 as well. By the time was released, there were already various discussions in progress about the viability of the old gameplay formula, which had not evolved dramatically since 1996.” With , and Capcom’s all changing the gaming landscape in their own way, the series was starting to look quaint and old-fashioned in comparison. had actually begun life as before Capcom changed tack, feeling that the game had strayed too far away from the formula.
