Resident Evil - Code: Veronica - On this day

Resident Evil 3 was the last game of the Capcom series on the PlayStation console. What is not widely known is that Nemesis was not originally supposed to be the third part of the series but a spin-off title. The real sequel to Resident Evil 2 was supposed to be a game that was later called Resident Evil - Code: Veronica, and it first appeared on the Japanese market on this day exactly 22 years ago.

Resident Evil Code: Veronica didn’t end up as the third part of Resident Evil because it was ultimately a whole new chapter on the new platform. Sega bought Resident Evil’s temporary exclusivity for its Sega Dreamcast console at the time, and it was an opportunity for Capcom to experiment with some new ideas.

For starters, Code: Veronica marked the transition of the Resident Evil series to a full 3D performance. Namely, in the first three games, only the characters and objects were modeled in 3D, while the whole environment in the background was in a static 2D version.

That changed with Code: Veronica, and with it came the first camera control feature in Resident Evil, as well as the first weapon targeting from a first-person perspective (though only for certain weapons).

Although the essence of Resident Evil was transferred to Code: Veronica, and here we primarily mean zombies and other mutated monsters, something different could already be noticed in that game. The Code: Veronica plot took place mostly on an island in the Arctic Ocean, where the architecture was of Gothic or European origin.

Resident Evil 4 continued in the same tone. It was played with a total of three characters: Chris Redfield and his sister Claire, and a brand new character named Steve. 

Resident Evil Code: Veronica paid for its Sega Dreamcast exclusivity with poor sales. A year later, therefore, a faster-better version was made for the PlayStation 2 console, called Resident Evil Code: Veronica X. That version brought only ten minutes of new animation but ultimately served as the basis for all other ports on other consoles, which included the GameCube version (2003), PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 versions (2011), and PlayStation 4 version (2017).