This Week In Retro: Resident Evil [1996] (Patreon)

March 22, 1996: Dawn of the Dread

by Diamond Feit

What makes a video game a horror game? There have been scary elements in games from the medium's earliest history: The dragons in Adventure. The end of Missile Command. Berzerk's Evil Otto—all of these things startled and frightened me as a child, but none of those games are considered "horror."

25 years ago this week, Capcom released Resident Evil for the PlayStation, creating the "survival horror" genre and more significantly, advancing the medium of video games towards more mature themes. Resident Evil was not the first game to tackle violent subject matter or attempt to convey horror to players, but it arrived at just the right time on just the right platform to garner extraordinary critical and commercial success. No one saw Resident Evil coming, and none of us were ready for what would follow in its wake.

And in case I haven't made this clear, it was absolutely terrifying.

Video games were not created as a means to entertain children (the earliest coin-operated arcade games found their fans in bars) but when they exploded in popularity in the 1980s, games became associated with youth. Arcades turned into hangouts for teenagers and latch-key kids, and once the Nintendo Entertainment System leveraged R.O.B. to conquer toy stores across America, the public's perception was fixed. Even in Japan, where Nintendo's "Family Computer" had software for adults, the marketing for the ground-breaking console and most hit titles was aimed at a young audience.

Growing up in the United States during this time period, I was the perfect age to see the medium capture the attention of everyone under 12 and then struggle with the limitations that came with said reputation. By the time I reached high school, violent video games garnered strict scrutiny from parents' groups and even our elected officials. The double-standard baffled me: If I was old enough to watch R-rated films, why wasn't anyone ready for R-rated games?

Speaking of films, while games were growing and evolving during the 1980s, movies also underwent radical change with the rise of home video and cable television. Going out to a theater was no longer the only way to watch a movie, and the erosion of that barrier to entry meant a lot more kids could see movies never intended for them. Without the nationwide proliferation of video store shelves and late-night cable airings, there's no way I would have grown up aware of the Friday the 13th series, and yet everyone my age could recognize Jason Voorhees—even before he had his own NES game.

This is a long-winded way of explaining that when Resident Evil made its commercial debut in March 1996, 19-year-old-me bought a copy on day one. I was hardly a horror "fan" but between sneaking tense glances at zombie-movie VHS covers and catching Tales From the Crypt on HBO, I knew I liked to be scared. I had also recently acquired a Sony PlayStation and I was eager to see something on the system that I absolutely couldn't see anywhere else. I knew the Capcom name and logo from the company's many colorful arcade and console games, but this new release didn't look like a Mega Man sequel. Resident Evil promised a dark, adult adventure with graphics and sound of a caliber never-before seen on a console—and it made good on all its promises thanks to a bit of digital sleight-of-hand.

The Resident Evil development team wanted to create an immersive environment to explore, but they knew the hardware could only support so much data on screen at once. A fully 3D space would have necessarily featured drab textures lacking detail. The solution was to present the game world as a series of pre-rendered backgrounds; only the player characters and other essential, interactive components would be actual 3D models. The fixed backgrounds meant that players could only explore each screen from a specific camera angle, but this served to enhance the game's spooky atmosphere: The only way to see what lurked around each corner of the mansion was to march the hero towards the unknown until the camera angle changed.

A deliberate scarcity of resources added to Resident Evil's already tense setting. The game seals the player inside a haunted house and dares them to find the exit, but only offers the player a knife, a handgun, and one magazine's worth of bullets to start. Each of these items takes up one slot in an extremely tight inventory system, forcing the player to carefully choose which objects scattered around the mansion can safely be picked up and which must be left behind. Even saving the game requires finding a typewriter and using a consumable ink ribbon, turning a routine game function into another tense choice: Can I afford to save the game right now, or do I keep going and risk losing everything?

These technical solutions and challenging restrictions are both brilliant examples of Resident Evil using limitations to build suspense. Video games tend to be tales of empowerment where players gain otherworldly abilities to conquer evil and save the Earth. Resident Evil stacks the deck against the player, asking them to make do by scrounging for ammo inside a creaky old house. There are more weapons to find, of course, but surviving long enough to discover the next upgrade is half the thrill.

In the many years since Resident Evil's original release, expert players have mastered the ideal route through the game and determined that there is ample ammunition to defeat all the monsters in the mansion. In fact, there's not much challenge to the game in a traditional sense: Most of the enemies move slower than the player and can be avoided altogether (including many bosses). That wisdom only comes via the benefit of hindsight, however, and it underscores how effectively Resident Evil delivers horror and tension regardless of how threatening the monsters actually are. Turns out being scared isn't always tied to being in danger.

Of course, I had no way of knowing any of that when I first played Resident Evil in 1996. I found the entire idea of the game so terrifying that I was unable to play it alone. Instead, it became a multiplayer game for me and my friends; a kind of interactive horror movie that one person could operate while the rest spectated. We had no guidebook to help us and the primitive state of the internet at the time meant that we had no lifeline to seek aid. I can remember nights where we played until dawn, driven solely by our curiosity to discover what could possibly happen next.

Today, Resident Evil isn't just a 25-year-old video game. With dozens of sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, it has become a global brand encompassing action, science-fiction, and horror tropes. Resident Evil is so large, it is no longer unique—an inevitable consequence of success in the video game space where every hit product becomes prime imitation-fodder. A two-word phrase on a loading screen, "survival horror," became the game's official genre and a slew of knock-offs would follow in the late '90s and early 2000s. While many of these titles flirted with developing their own systems and rules, they weren't shy about their source of inspiration.

The funny thing about Resident Evil spawning an entire genre of wannabe successors is that the series itself quickly shed so much of what made it special. Each sequel upped the ante from the previous game, giving players more guns, more bullets, and bigger beasts to fight. The original plot of "explore dark house" gave way to grander stages; within five years, the series would become a trans-national tale of revenge, followed by a trilogy of blockbuster action spectaculars. As of this writing, the world is eagerly anticipating the upcoming eighth chapter.

For all the transformations Resident Evil has undergone since 1996, I still consider myself a fan of the series despite how little DNA remains from that original game. I can't fault the series for changing though, because how could it stay the same? To the eyes of my 21st-century children, games can be about anything at all, and the platforms they're released on no longer have a distinct identity from one another. What's more, my kids have seen enough Twitch and YouTube in their lives that no amount of shuffling zombies could shock them. Resident Evil is just a name to them, like Marvel or Star Wars. Maybe they'll grow to like it, but I doubt they'll grow to fear it.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games (including Resident Evil!) on Twitch.