It would be interesting to uncover a bit of research into which of the almost endless entry points players took when arriving at the Resident Evil series; having shambled along, slithered across, and dug through the subterranean of the highly varying video game landscapes that transpired between our modern era and the fossilised 1996, Resident Evil has encouraged a heterogeneous population within its fandom unseen in the fauna of most AAA IPs fence boundaries. From survival horror to action horror to horror action to straight action, all while keeping the comedy of everything very much alive; roping in first person, third person, multiplayer focused, score attack arcade modes, online asymmetrical multiplayer, squad tactics, and more. Players have come from Silent Hill, Call of Duty, Demon’s Souls, Monkey Island, and Myst: all of them feeling at home within the endless, and still expanding, boundaries of RE. Of course there are age demographic influences - I first came on the tracks with RE4 (maybe the most common entry point just due to proliferation and staying power) - but for a series so obsessed, and excellent in their handling with, architecture, I think it’s fair to commit to an assumption that there is a semi-solid and slick superstructure in our collective videogame metropolis that subtly funnels players from all burroughs into the heart of Racoon City.
Seeing the past in hindsight can kill a good historical idea; choosing to disallow agency to the contexts of a world we’ve moved on from, its actors somehow fated for what they will receive, from the calendar years coming and from our perspective apart, is a surefire way to deaden the creativity and stupidity of uniquely beautiful human experiences, that mess of a shambolic grease lair surely a wonder if there ever was one to visit at a gallery. But for a wee exercise, let’s compare briefly how different the RE of 2002 was to today. In 2022, Resident Evil is everything that was stated above: fps, tps, asymmetrical multiplayer, etc. It is a series content only with being an entire medium’s worth of investigative in-game actions purposed towards uncovering the various viruses and parasites infesting that version of reality. In 2002, RE was at a critical breaking point typified by having an ill-contentedness of being anything beyond that era’s definition of survival horror, despite the RE series itself essentially writing the guidebook for the still extremely young genre. The action slowly ramping up in RE3, the cast expanding in Code Veronica, the boundaries of play atrophying into something more elastic in Survivor; every step taken away from the template was seen as a germ of treason making insurgents of every model and verb within the expanding Resident Evil universe. That trepidation to move beyond might seem to some prudent and exacting of the formula which would allow instalments of spooky mansions puzzles through and twisted scientists foiled to visit the public once every few years. It might seem to others a cowardly and conditional respect the creators have for the evolving face of their creative ambitions and the respect their audience has for the team’s authorial flexing. I think what at that time, without inserting myself from 2022 into 2002, would have astounded both camps was the idea to revisit the land of bumper crop creepies after straying far afield and announcing, ‘that yield abundant wasn’t good enough.’
OK, mythologizing aside, Shinji Mikami and his team having returned to rebuild one of the holy sites of survival horror was one of the grandest gifts for gaming and its possibilities as an evolving medium. Not only was it a simultaneous affirmation of design as a flexile and permeable art that could erode lands, be boiled through different states, and shaped into sculptures, pillars, and tools, it was also a triumph for the ways in which video games can be seen as a oral art - a space in which traditions are lost in their matter but continuous in their evocation: one program dies as all ports and platform support fades away but further lives on in the designers acting like carrion angels with its corpse, feeding on morsels twenty years away. Returning to their own work, now past in generations which had rapidly evolved beyond the limitations it had been set behind, styles it had aped going from cool to gauche, dominance of market going from pulp to prestige, the team was able to use some alchemist’s stone in foiling copper to gold. The forgoing of tank controls alone is almost certainly the largest influence in why REmake lives on in a way that the original no longer can: that scheme concerned the limitations of the PS1 with moderate eloquence, and it was never as bad as it is now made out to be, but drop in and play will always mesh with an experiential medium far more elegantly than frictional stoppage. Very few emotions or tones in art can coalesce well with input frustration; it is very difficult to feel the tension of a zombie closing off an available passage when, open or not, the passage is a nightmare to cross with your available toolset. The broadening of system interaction is also marvellously managed - the introduction of Crimson Heads and their dispatch turns what was more or less a metroidvania without movement verbs making backtracking a delight instead of a chore, it takes that retreading aspect of that genre and survival horrors it: the backtracking is done out of desperation, fear, scarcity, and ratcheting risks popping up the mansion over - essentially turning the metroidvania unlocking ‘I can’t wait to go there’ into a survival horror ‘I have to get back there… or else.’
The general flavour of the updated and more professionally curated art assets and VO is up to preference when judging whether it trumps or fails the 1996 original, but it looks marvellous to me in a way the 96 game merely looked functional. The cinematic strength of both the moment to moment play as well as the cinematics speaks to a general trend set in both the indie sphere (such as the utter brilliance of 30 Flights editing making the narrative art) as well as the AAA sphere up to today (The Last of Us isn’t just calling back with zombies, you know). It’s association of characters with space, setting up tiny denouements of dramatic irony in every encounter Jill or Chris has with a zombie that the player may not see or the PC may not see; it’s rigorous cinematic counter-argument to the betrayals of Barry making a strong point against the moralistic ask of how big of a person can you really be when asked to step up; Wesker more or less looks like a god and rightly is treated like one: the entire shape of what we see is brilliant in every aspect (Lisa Trevor fancam incoming).
Nobody needs to be convinced to play this game 20 years later, they’re either already saddling up to visit the Spencer Mansion or they aren’t. It isn’t a must play game because no games are must play games. But if there is one game that linchpins early 3D gaming to modern 3D gaming, it’s RE4. But there’s no RE4 without REmake.
Seeing the past in hindsight can kill a good historical idea; choosing to disallow agency to the contexts of a world we’ve moved on from, its actors somehow fated for what they will receive, from the calendar years coming and from our perspective apart, is a surefire way to deaden the creativity and stupidity of uniquely beautiful human experiences, that mess of a shambolic grease lair surely a wonder if there ever was one to visit at a gallery. But for a wee exercise, let’s compare briefly how different the RE of 2002 was to today. In 2022, Resident Evil is everything that was stated above: fps, tps, asymmetrical multiplayer, etc. It is a series content only with being an entire medium’s worth of investigative in-game actions purposed towards uncovering the various viruses and parasites infesting that version of reality. In 2002, RE was at a critical breaking point typified by having an ill-contentedness of being anything beyond that era’s definition of survival horror, despite the RE series itself essentially writing the guidebook for the still extremely young genre. The action slowly ramping up in RE3, the cast expanding in Code Veronica, the boundaries of play atrophying into something more elastic in Survivor; every step taken away from the template was seen as a germ of treason making insurgents of every model and verb within the expanding Resident Evil universe. That trepidation to move beyond might seem to some prudent and exacting of the formula which would allow instalments of spooky mansions puzzles through and twisted scientists foiled to visit the public once every few years. It might seem to others a cowardly and conditional respect the creators have for the evolving face of their creative ambitions and the respect their audience has for the team’s authorial flexing. I think what at that time, without inserting myself from 2022 into 2002, would have astounded both camps was the idea to revisit the land of bumper crop creepies after straying far afield and announcing, ‘that yield abundant wasn’t good enough.’
OK, mythologizing aside, Shinji Mikami and his team having returned to rebuild one of the holy sites of survival horror was one of the grandest gifts for gaming and its possibilities as an evolving medium. Not only was it a simultaneous affirmation of design as a flexile and permeable art that could erode lands, be boiled through different states, and shaped into sculptures, pillars, and tools, it was also a triumph for the ways in which video games can be seen as a oral art - a space in which traditions are lost in their matter but continuous in their evocation: one program dies as all ports and platform support fades away but further lives on in the designers acting like carrion angels with its corpse, feeding on morsels twenty years away. Returning to their own work, now past in generations which had rapidly evolved beyond the limitations it had been set behind, styles it had aped going from cool to gauche, dominance of market going from pulp to prestige, the team was able to use some alchemist’s stone in foiling copper to gold. The forgoing of tank controls alone is almost certainly the largest influence in why REmake lives on in a way that the original no longer can: that scheme concerned the limitations of the PS1 with moderate eloquence, and it was never as bad as it is now made out to be, but drop in and play will always mesh with an experiential medium far more elegantly than frictional stoppage. Very few emotions or tones in art can coalesce well with input frustration; it is very difficult to feel the tension of a zombie closing off an available passage when, open or not, the passage is a nightmare to cross with your available toolset. The broadening of system interaction is also marvellously managed - the introduction of Crimson Heads and their dispatch turns what was more or less a metroidvania without movement verbs making backtracking a delight instead of a chore, it takes that retreading aspect of that genre and survival horrors it: the backtracking is done out of desperation, fear, scarcity, and ratcheting risks popping up the mansion over - essentially turning the metroidvania unlocking ‘I can’t wait to go there’ into a survival horror ‘I have to get back there… or else.’
The general flavour of the updated and more professionally curated art assets and VO is up to preference when judging whether it trumps or fails the 1996 original, but it looks marvellous to me in a way the 96 game merely looked functional. The cinematic strength of both the moment to moment play as well as the cinematics speaks to a general trend set in both the indie sphere (such as the utter brilliance of 30 Flights editing making the narrative art) as well as the AAA sphere up to today (The Last of Us isn’t just calling back with zombies, you know). It’s association of characters with space, setting up tiny denouements of dramatic irony in every encounter Jill or Chris has with a zombie that the player may not see or the PC may not see; it’s rigorous cinematic counter-argument to the betrayals of Barry making a strong point against the moralistic ask of how big of a person can you really be when asked to step up; Wesker more or less looks like a god and rightly is treated like one: the entire shape of what we see is brilliant in every aspect (Lisa Trevor fancam incoming).
Nobody needs to be convinced to play this game 20 years later, they’re either already saddling up to visit the Spencer Mansion or they aren’t. It isn’t a must play game because no games are must play games. But if there is one game that linchpins early 3D gaming to modern 3D gaming, it’s RE4. But there’s no RE4 without REmake.