Books: the history of the creation of Resident Evil will appear in Russian. We publish an excerpt

The original book is called Itchy, Tasty: An Unofficial History of Resident Evil. The English version was released last April, and it was written by Alex Aniel, the business manager of the distributor Limited Run Games.

For his book, Aniel spent two years communicating with developers. He found out what was happening at Capcom during the inception of the franchise, how the games developed, and how Resident Evil saved the company from financial problems. He also talked about many other important things for the series.

The Russian edition is due out on May 30.

Below is an excerpt from the book.

THE ADVENT OF SURVIVAL HORROR: HOW RESIDENT EVIL WORKS

The original 1996 Resident Evil was remembered by gamers as a unique game for its time. As part of the branding, Capcom coined the term “survival horror” for the name of the genre to emphasize that the essence of the game was not only in the struggle for life, but also in fear, uncertainty and tension. Resident Evil combined both survival and horror, which allowed the name “survival horror” to become common.

The plot of Resident Evil begins with the fact that members of the Alpha police team from the S.T.A.R.S. unit (Special Response and Rescue Squad) are sent to the last known coordinates of their colleagues from the Bravo team. Colleagues have gone missing while investigating horrific murders in the woods near Raccoon City. Soon the Alpha team finds out the reason for the brutal reprisals: This is the work of zombies created by the evil pharmaceutical corporation, whose headquarters is located in the laboratory under the Spencer estate — a large and mysterious mansion. The estate stands in one of the forests of the Midwest of the United States, on the outskirts of the fictional city of Raccoon City.

We can assume that Resident Evil presented a rudimentary version of what gamers now call the “open world”. Despite the downloads with animated doors, there was a place for a lot of realistically connected rooms and corridors in the game. Here you will not find magic green pipes that teleport your character to the other side of the world in two seconds. The only exception to this rule can be called boxes for items. Due to the fact that the characters are allowed to carry only six (or eight) items at a time, things that are currently unnecessary must be put in boxes placed throughout the estate. They are magically connected to each other: the process of extracting objects from them is the only element of the game that violates the space—time continuum of the universe.

The Resident Evil device is very different from Capcom’s early 2D games like Mega Man with its completely unrelated zones or Street Fighter II, whose arenas are united only by a world map with which players do not directly interact. In Resident Evil, players must open doors to move around the game map, which often involves solving puzzles or searching for unusual items like coats of arms with animals or weather symbols engraved on them. Behind such doors, players can expect new items and weapons that bring the player closer to the final.

The world of Resident Evil has become possible thanks to the three-dimensional gameplay and graphics engine. Initially, the development team conceived the game with a first-person view, but this required more polygons and computing power than programmers could extract from the PlayStation at an early stage of the console’s lifecycle. Instead, the developers have achieved realistic graphics using a clever combination of polygonal character models and pre-rendered backgrounds. The characters are ordinary people wandering through rooms where you can find ordinary objects like typewriters, kitchen tables, bookshelves, keys, baths, diaries with hints and so on. These objects are no longer pixel renderers, as they were on consoles of the last generation. Many people at the time of the release of Resident Evil considered its graphics a masterpiece in comparison with other PlayStation games. Of course, the picture could not compare in quality with the cartoon “Toy Story”, but the game was still perceived as a technical breakthrough. The advantage of pre-rendered backgrounds was the increased detail of visual effects, a smoother frame rate and claustrophobic, but atmospheric camera angles that allow players to observe what is happening. Only the separation of rooms by non-permeable animations with five-second downloads prevents Resident Evil from being considered a full-fledged open-world game. This is a conscious design decision by the development team, taking into account the limited capabilities of the PlayStation system memory. The console could only display one well-rendered room at a time.

Enemy characters of the game make a lot of sense in the name of the genre “survival horror”. The existence of the zombies that have become the hallmark of the series is justified by the mysterious T-virus created by the mysterious Umbrella Corporation. Of course, the use of zombies was not considered something unique: by 1996 they had already gained worldwide fame due to films such as “Night of the Living Dead” by George Romero. In Resident Evil, the concept of zombies evolved because the audience met the undead, who for the first time went beyond Halloween costumes and movies, where it was impossible to influence the plot. The game for the first time gave the opportunity to directly encounter zombies. Gamers fought them with firearms or combat knives, while zombies, in turn, could bite the character in response and even kill him, inflicting a certain amount of damage. The audience no longer had to sit back and watch the action unfold by itself. Now they directly controlled their actions and the fate of the characters.

Players have to face not only zombies. At the beginning of the action there is a moment when two Cerberus (zombie dogs named after the dog Hades from Greek mythology) without any warning attack the hero through the window. This scene has become one of the most memorable in the history of the games. Most likely, this is the moment that players remember first, and the reason for that is its suddenness. As soon as the Cerberus appear, the music changes to a crazy percussion composition that raises the tension to an unbearable level. However, as enemies, Cerberus do not pose much danger, because they cannot do much damage. Unlike zombies, it is more difficult to aim at dogs, but fewer bullets are required to kill them, so collisions with them can be considered more of a minor nuisance than a serious problem, if, of course, the player can regain composure after such an unexpected appearance.

Another thing is the hunters who appear in the middle of the game. These humpback reptiles with green skin are equipped with sharp claws on their hands and feet, which makes them faster and more dangerous than zombies, since they can decapitate players with a devastating jump attack at moments when the character is extremely vulnerable. The hunter’s first appearance is another iconic scene, as the creature appears in a CGI video. When the player enters a previously visited room in the second act of the game, a first-person video shows an agile and obviously deadly creature running towards the protagonist. The players have no idea what they are facing, but after the screensaver, control returns to them, and the hunter himself is in the room. Players have a matter of seconds to deal with the new threat. To survive, you need to choose a powerful weapon like a shotgun.

Each of the enemies does everything possible so that the player does not lose the motivation to fight for his life in a terrible nightmare, no matter how great the chances of success are. The fate of the character depends entirely on the player, so it is necessary to correctly allocate resources, assess situations and apply the necessary skills to complete the game as a whole. It was this key difference between a video game and a movie that prompted Mikami to choose zombies as the main antagonists of the game. In an interview with NowGamer, he told how sorry he was that the characters of Dawn of the Dead would never be able to escape the fate invented by the screenwriters, no matter how much the public wanted it. This is the state of affairs he wanted to change with the help of Resident Evil.

Nevertheless, it is somewhat ironic to describe Resident Evil as a game that allows players to “control” what is happening, given the so-called inconvenient tank control. It has been criticized for many years for excessive complexity and a low level of intuitiveness. It’s hard to argue with this — you control the character clumsily, as if driving a tank. In Japanese, tank control is called rajikon- sousa, where the word rajikon comes from a combination of the English words radio and controls. We are talking about a toy racing car controlled by a remote control with two sticks — one for moving forward or backward, and the other for turning the wheels to the sides. This control allows the in-game character to move forward when the player presses the “up” button on the gamepad, and back away when he presses “down”, regardless of where the hero’s gaze is directed. A different approach to management is implemented in Super Mario 64, another 1996 game: “up” always makes Mario move forward, and “down” turns him around and moves him in the opposite direction.

Control problems in Resident Evil are compounded by pre-rendered backgrounds, which sometimes keep enemies out of sight. Players know that the enemies are in the room because they hear them, but they cannot see them because of the static camera angles. Attacking “invisible” enemies is an integral part of the classic Resident Evil, even if such situations seem annoying. In the Japanese version, this problem was solved with the help of automatic weapon guidance: pressing R1 on the PlayStation gamepad helped the character to aim directly at the enemy, allowing players to shoot more confidently. However, the auto-aiming feature was removed from the North American version to increase the difficulty, in order to encourage North Americans to buy the game rather than rent it. In any case, the Japanese versions were not available at the box office.

The developers understood that such management has its disadvantages. When Yoshiki Okamoto joined them at the end of 1995 to replace the outgoing executive producer Tokuro Fujiwara, he almost first turned to Shinji Mikami with the question of whether it was possible to determine which type of control was more suitable for the game — tank-like or real-time. The development team tested both schemes in pre-release builds and came to the conclusion that tank control made the game more frightening. “In the pre-build, the control was carried out in real time, akin to how it was in Devil May Cry, but the game no longer seemed scary and difficult, because it was too easy to escape from zombies. As a result, we retained tank control,” Okamoto recalls. He discussed other changes with Mikami. Okamoto asked to increase to three the number of ink tapes that are used on typewriters found in some locations. Such machines were needed to save the player’s progress to the PlayStation memory card. In May 1998, in an interview with the Japanese publisher Micro Design Publishing, Okamoto joked that without this change, “the game would have been dedicated to the constant search for ink tapes.” After joining the team, Okamoto saw Resident Evil as a “crappy game” that could be made good if a few changes were made. His advice played a crucial role.

Despite the advertised game design innovations, Resident Evil is actually not the first horror game. If you look at games not from Capcom, it can be noted that Mystery House was released on the Atari 2600, and on the PC — Alone in the Dark. I can say with confidence that Resident Evil was the first survival horror game ever released due to the combination of a realistic three-dimensional game world, truly scary enemies and controls that allowed players to confront zombies without making them too easy targets. It is thanks to the genre-defining elements that the phrase “survival horror” has resonated with the entire gaming community and has become a household name for almost any video game with elements of horror and fear, although in fact it cannot be used in games not from Capcom. Konami calls its Silent Hill series a “horror adventure”, and Koei Tecmo calls Fatal Frame (Project Zero in Europe) a “horror action adventure”. But in the eyes of an ordinary gamer, all of them still seem to be survival horror. And despite all the technical limitations, the realistic world of Resident Evil allows survival and horror elements to complement each other so effectively that Alone in the Dark, Clock Tower and Sweet Home remain far behind. In a 2010 retrospective from NowGamer, Shinji Mikami admitted that “you can’t call Resident Evil a beautiful game right now.” He also reminded the audience that at that time it was “incredibly difficult to make a PlayStation game.” By today’s standards, Resident Evil may seem obsolete, but the impact that Resident Evil had on the industry in those years cannot be overestimated.