Resident Evil, known in Japan as Biohazard (バイオハザード), is a survival horror video game by Capcom. The inaugural title and first installment in the Resident Evil series, it was originally released in 1996 for the PlayStation and has subsequently been ported to the Sega Saturn and IBM compatible PC.
In 2002, a remake of the game was released for the Nintendo GameCube featuring new graphics, voice acting and many significant gameplay changes.
Plot[]
A team of S.T.A.R.S (Special Tactics And Rescue Squad) members are called to investigate a series of murders near Raccoon City. While searching the woods near the city, the team is attacked by bloodthirsty dogs and they have to retreat to a nearby mansion.
The game gave the player a choice of two different characters. Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine.
Gameplay[]
It was one of the first games to be dubbed a "survival horror", borrowing from the "ambient survival horror" genre coined by Alone in the Dark. Accordingly, Game Informer refers to "the original Resident Evil" as "one of the most important games of all time". The inspiration for Resident Evil was the earlier Capcom game Sweet Home. Shinji Mikami was initially commissioned to make a horror game set in a haunted mansion like Sweet Home.
Trivia[]
- The earlier available prototype demo (08/04/1995) have a few differences with the final game: some camera angles, room layout, textures and lights placement are changed. There is also a bit of totally exclusive content like messages written in blood on the walls. And Yawn (the giant snake) is not encountred at the same place, being confronted at the entrance of the garden, at the end of the demo.
- Originally, the game was supposed to be in first person, this idea would be fully realized with Resident Evil: Survivor.
- A Nintendo DS port was released back in 2006 as Resident Evil: Deadly Silence. It include a few bonuses such as an all new original campaign starring Richard and a (fixed) first person mode.
- A mobile phone remake, called Resident Evil: Genesis was released in 2008. Chris and Rebecca are absent from this version and the layout of the mansion is also altered.
- A Gameboy color port of the game was nearly finished, when it was finally cancelled. Hopefully, a rom is available on the net. This version is also very impressive graphically considering the hardware it's running on.
- There is a lesser known version of the game running on the original Famicom, it's a bootleg version made in 2003 by a pirate company named Waixing. It's also a pretty faithfull adaptation of the original game.
- More recently, some fans of the original game ported it to the Sega Genesis under the title Bio Evil, opting for an isometric view point.
- Resident Evil’s success pushed other big companies to produce their own original survival horror IP, like Square Enix’s Parasite Eve, Sega’s Deep Fear, Crave’s Galerians, Taito’s Chaos Break, Bandai’s Countdown Vampires, Eidos’s Fear Effect, Sunsoft’s Hard Edge, Koei’s Enigma, Konami’s Silent Hill and Tecmo’s Fatal Frame.