Resident Evil 2 - On this day

We recently wrote that Resident Evil 4 was the best part of the Capcom series for many. But before that, Resident Evil 2 was considered the best classic Resi experience - with a fixed camera and static backgrounds. The Resident Evil 2 game came out on this day, exactly 24 years ago, on the first PlayStation.

Development of Resident Evil 2 began just a month after the completion of the first part, in early 1996. In the early stages of the game, also called "Resident Evil 1.5", Capcom envisioned an adventure with two characters, but their paths were not intertwined.

It was supposed to be a game in which players would be attacked by far more zombies at the same time than in the first part. However, this was eventually abandoned due to technical limitations, so in the final version, only seven zombies could appear on the screen at the same time.

The story of Resident Evil 2 introduced us to new characters: Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield. The duo met in Raccoon City very quickly, but they were also quickly separated so that the player could have two separate adventures on two separate CDs.

This was not news for the Resident Evil series, but unlike the previous game, playing with different characters had different scenarios depending on their actions. For example, if you picked up a weapon with one character in one location, playing with another character after that, you could no longer find that weapon in that location. This is a specificity that was not repeated in the remake of the 2019 game.

Resident Evil 2 had a rich marketing campaign in the US where about $ 5 million was spent on promotion. The sale was successful so that close to half a million copies were sold on the first weekend alone, which was extremely high at the time. Moreover, at the time, RE2 earned more that weekend than Hollywood movies in theaters at the time.

The game appeared on PC and Nintendo 64 the same year and later on Dreamcast and GameCube. Six million copies were sold in total. In 2015, it was announced that Resident Evil 2 would get its full-blooded remake, and in 2017, the official board game was also announced. We received a remake the year before last, and, interestingly, there is a reference to today's date - the registration of the engine driven by Claire Redfield reads "J2198". J of course stands for “January”.