Resident Evil - On this day

The Resident Evil franchise is celebrating its 26th birthday today, and it is an opportunity to remember how this extremely influential horror series started at. And he set off unexpectedly - a success that came as a surprise. At first, Capcom didn't know what exactly they wanted to do with the project of the then young Shinji Mikami, who took the motives of the abandoned villa and the team researching it from Capcom's earlier game called Sweethome.

In the early stages of Resident Evil’s development, there were no zombies at all but the enemies were aliens, and the game was supposed to be a first-person shooter. But, with the combination of fate, everything somehow fell into place, and the players on the first PlayStation were honored with a phenomenal horror game.

Well, when we say phenomenal, it should be taken with restraint, that is, the context of the situation at the time. Resident Evil wasn’t original - genre-like Alone in the Dark had been around for a few years then - but Resident Evil kept us on the edge of the chair with its structure and damn good mood. If you didn’t flinch in that hallway where the dog jumps out the window, you’ve missed an incredibly important part of gaming history.

Looking at it quite objectively, Resident Evil was actually on the level of an amateur film. The dialogues in the game have remained worse to this day than in some porn movies, but fans have found sympathy in their bizarrely poor quality, at least on the humorous side. "Jill sandwich", "Master of unlocking" and another burglary of the original Resident Evil eventually became memes and part of the general gaming culture. One wonders how bad the Japanese actors were then since we never heard them because Mikami was not happy with their performances.

Resident Evil set the standards of the so-called survival horror genre and after the initial success began to appear in various versions. In 1997, he received his Director's Cut edition, which changed the positions of the enemy and almost all important items, and showed some scenes that had previously been censored. The game was originally developed only for the PlayStation console but later appeared on Sega Saturn and PC. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary, the game also appeared on the portable Nintendo DS console in an edition subtitled Deadly Silence.

The original Resi is quite difficult to play in its original version today, but the game was completely redesigned for the Nintendo GameCube in 2002. It took a long time for this rework to be available outside of Nintendo's console, but it finally happened with the 2015 HD remaster, which is available on almost all current platforms.

Resident Evil became a global franchise after its first appearance, largely helped by film adaptations, but fans have become saturated and resentful over the years with what Resident Evil has become after moving away from zombies, enclosed spaces, and intimidating players. Fortunately, some of that came back in the seventh part, and then in the remake of Resident Evil 2.