One of undoubtedly the most iconic games of the 1990s can be safely considered the first Resident Evil. The game has left an indelible mark on the entire history of gaming and today is considered one of the best not only in its genre, but also outside it. On March 22, 1996, the game was released in Japan, from where it later began a victorious procession around the world. In honor of the anniversary, Cybersport.ru offers a look at the history of the original Resident Evil and how and why it came to success.
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Fertilized soil
Sweet Home Title Screen
Before talking about the hero of the day, it is worth returning to the distant 1989. At the beginning of the year, the Japanese horror film Sweet Home was released, and towards the end – the video game of the same name for Famicom, also known as NES (and in Russia – by its illegal brother “Dandy”). Its main ideological inspirer is considered Tokuro Fujiwara, the “father” of Ghosts ‘n Goblins and one of the key creators of Mega Man.
Sweet Home is an RPG in the horror genre. A group of five documentary filmmakers is trapped in a huge mansion inhabited by various evil spirits. The house once belonged to an artist who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. In the course of the game, you can learn the real story of a gloomy mansion that hides many secrets, but in the context of comparison with Resident Evil, we are interested in slightly different things.
It is worth starting with the fact that initially Resident Evil (in Japan – Biohazard, which we will talk about later) was conceived as a remake of Sweet Home. Of course, the cursed mansion was left behind, like the ghosts, and the number of characters was reduced, but some features reached the release version. For example, it was in Sweet Home that short inserts with opening doors, an emphasis on survival, riddles, inventory management, notes scattered around the mansion and various endings depending on decisions during the game debuted at Sweet Home.
The rejection of the remake was largely due to a very simple reason – Capcom lost the rights to the original film. Fujiwaru, however, was not upset by this turn of events: although the original game turned out well (often referred to as one of the most important titles among horror games), he was not satisfied with the limitations of the Famicom. Most of the games before it he created for arcades, where the power was much higher than that of a home console, so the picture quality in Sweet Home did not reach the level he wanted.
First shoots
Interesting fact: the cover of the American edition was drawn by the famous comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz
Resident Evil began to emerge in 1993. Fujiwara took over as producer and handed over the reins to promising newcomer Shinji Mikami. The company made such a decision ambiguously: before RE, Mikami worked only on children’s games (mainly on the Disney franchises), moreover, he openly admitted that he did not particularly like to be scared. How such a person can create something terrible, no one understood – but the producer assured everyone that Mikami would cope.
The newcomer approached the matter in detail: he went through the original with which he had to work, watched the film that started it all, and did not hesitate to watch many other horror films. Among the main sources of inspiration, he named Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Lucio Fulci’s Flesh Eaters: from the first the hotel was borrowed, which turned into Spencer’s mansion, from the second – the image of the carnivorous dead.
At first, Mikami worked alone: he created many sketches, was engaged in the development of characters and locations, and wrote a draft script. At first, RE was not much like the final result: it was conceived as a first-person game and was much closer to Sweet Home. But during the presentation and brainstorming, the development team decided to abandon the paranormal in favor of a more physical and tangible experience – somewhere here the idea of a zombie in the spirit of Fulci and Romero finally took shape.
The only surviving image from the first-person version of Resident Evil
They decided to change the camera for several reasons at once. In the mid-1990s, it was very difficult to create a game in a full-fledged three-dimensional space due to the limitations of hardware: the new PlayStation at that time, although it produced a picture that was cool for its time, but for this it had to go to many tricks. The solution came after Mikami first launched Alone in the Dark in 1992: cinematic foreshortenings and pre-rendered backgrounds made in the form of static pictures allowed to achieve the required image quality. The feeling of three-dimensionality was achieved by adding three-dimensional characters that acted in “flat” rooms.
The new camera, among other things, allowed not only to save resources, but also to create unique situations: a correctly selected angle could whip up the atmosphere simply by limiting the player’s field of view. The roar of a zombie is audible, and where exactly the walking dead will attack, one can only guess. In addition, the camera created a feeling of unsettledness and a keen sense of a limited space, in which you couldn’t maneuver much.
The game that didn’t exist
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