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Many of our favorite video game franchises are starting to hit historic anniversaries, and it’s often easy to trace how they have grown from the first game to the last. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild shares much of the exploration and wonder of 1986 The legend of Zelda, while attracting items from almost every other adventure along the way. What aura is scheduled to turn 20, the DNA of Evolved combat and the much revered Golden Triangle are still around this fall season. Infinite halo. However, resident Evil is an iconic series that has gone through so many dramatic changes over the years that charting its progression provides confusion rather than guidance.
resident Evil recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, and one thing about Capcom’s revered franchise is clear: like all great horror, resident Evil refuses to stop changing.
The horror genre itself has evolved over the past centuries. The rise of Gothic horror in literature, particularly the works of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Edgar Allan Poe, helped popularize the genre. Similarly, German Expressionism helped introduce horror into cinema, while Universal’s monster movies like Dracula and Frankenstein brought this terror to the mainstream. This continued throughout the decades, with the looming shadow of atomic weaponry after the birth of World War II. Godzilla and a host of giant monster movies, while Alfred Hitchcock was busy terrorizing audiences with the horror that lived right next door. With each new decade, the horror morphed into something that mirrored the terror of the time.
Although the original resident Evil It came to PlayStation in Japan 25 years ago, the roots of horror at Capcom go back even further. RE was originally conceived as a remake of the 1989 Famicom game Sweet Home. In itself an adaptation of a movie of the same name, Sweet Home It had many elements that would become staples of the series: a spooky mansion filled with puzzles and monsters, limited resources and inventory management, and even a switch to first-person shots when you walked through a door. If the original resident Evil was the video game equivalent to Night of the Living Dead, later Sweet Home it was similar to silent classics like Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in the setting of the horror game genre.
By the time 1996 rolled around, Capcom was ready to give horror another shot, handing the now-legendary designer Shinji Mikami the keys. Although it certainly wasn’t the first 3D survival horror game, it was preceded by Alone in the dark, resident Evil He was absolutely the one who did it the best. Fixed camera angles gave Spencer Mansion a cinematic feel and helped create some jaw-dropping bespoke scares, like the iconic dogs crashing through the window. Scarce resources made each encounter a tense series of decisions about whether to resist and fight or flee. And it laid the groundwork for a whole mess of backstory and lore that would be explored with varying degrees of success in dozens of games.
With rave reviews and strong sales, the series went ahead with Resident Evil 2 and Justice both come to PlayStation, as well as Director’s Edition from the original game with reorganized challenges and not-so-uncensored content. This kind of reworking was appropriate, considering the long history of alternative cuts from horror movies like The Exorcist. This early period also solidified resident Evil as a platform agnostic franchise, appearing reliably on PlayStation but also making appearances on PC, Sega Saturn, and even Nintendo 64. After the original trilogy, the series began to move in whatever direction the wind blew, even if that was not the best decision in hindsight for several reasons. Veronica Code released in 2000 during the short but sweet life of the Sega Dreamcast. And in the following years, a new full version of resident Evil and prequel game Resident Evil Zero they were exclusive to GameCube.
This brief romance with Nintendo culminated in Capcom Five, which were five games that Capcom planned to release first on the GameCube. These included the excellent Viewtiful joe and Killer7, the stranger PN03, and the finally canceled Dead phoenix. But the undisputed highlight of this pentalogy was 2005 Resident Evil 4, that changed the trajectory of video games as we know them with its third-person action over the shoulder.
If I were to compare the impact that Resident Evil 4 had a single movie in games throughout history, it would be Jaws. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 horror hit changed movies forever, ushering in the era of summer blockbuster that would cement two years later with Star Wars. In a similar way, Resident Evil 4 it seemed like a demarcation line for third-person shooter games. Since Gears of war for Dead space for The last of us, The influence RE4 He had in countless games and franchises that followed cannot be understated.
After the monumental success of RE4, Capcom got a bit lost with Bad resident 5 and 6, which eschewed the series’ focus on horror and instead opted for a more bombastic, globe-trotting action, chasing trends set by people like Obligations. This same kind of thing happens in movies too. Just look at how the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe led to a host of different properties planning to make their own cinematic universes before they had released a single movie, like Obligations.
Meanwhile, spin-offs like Resident Evil Survivor and Dead target was based on cheap, specific tricks that felt right at home alongside late ’50s horror movies. William Castle’s Macabre promised a $ 1,000 life insurance policy to all viewers in case they were scared to death. Haunted hill house broke the fourth wall with a real plastic skeleton that flew around the cinema. AND The Tingle shook audiences with seat devices that caused vibrations coinciding with events in the film.
Horror elements have been infiltrating other genres over time, as seen in the child-centered terrors found in ET and Gremlins, finally establishing new subgenres like horror comedies. resident Evil it has spread to new frontiers in a similar way. Figures from the core series have appeared as playable fighters in the Marvel vs. Capcom series or letters in Teppen, and a large number of competitive and cooperative survival games have been released online, including last year Resistance and the next Reverse. Also, the resident Evil The franchise is responsible for the birth of several other Capcom series, including Dinosaur crisis, The devil can cry, and Onimusha.
Of course, there is no discussion about resident Evil and the movie is complete not to mention the times the two media have collided. The series has had a long and not-so-illustrious history on the big screen, including all six films starring Milla Jovovich, a handful of CGI animated films, and the upcoming Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which is undoubtedly shaping up to be the most faithful adaptation of the games we’ve seen so far.
While the franchise may have lost its way for a period, it made a comeback in recent years in two different ways. One was with a celebration of his past in the form of remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3. The terror is constantly reflecting on its own past and remaking its own history. Since Suspiria, for Dawn of the Dead, for almost all slasher franchises under the sun, if something worked once, someone will likely try to make it work again. This includes American remakes of modern foreign classics such as The ring and let the right one in. Even John Carpenter’s The thing, one of the great horror movies of all time, is itself a 1951 adaptation The thing from another world. In this sense, the recent RE2 and 3 The remakes carry the torch of horror well.
Apart from the remakes, Resident Evil 7 and the next Town once again they have demonstrated the malleability of horror in changing times. By switching to a first-person view, while harking back to some of the basics of the original PS1 classic, these new games manage to embrace the past while simultaneously preparing for the future. Case in point: resident Evil is by far Capcom’s best-selling franchise with over 100 million games sold and no signs of slowing down, like recent entries Resident Evil 7 and the Resident Evil 2 remake are among the 10 best-selling games in Capcom history.
Fear is a primordial and fundamental human emotion. The wave of terror that a particularly terrifying movie or video game produces helps us remember that we are still alive. As long as we continue to strive for that hustle, horror will continue to evolve to do so. And since also resident Evil has become interactive horror, there is no reason to believe that it will not continue to evolve for another 25 years.
