Resident Evil?
While it all began with Romero's yet-to-be-surpassed 1969 indie effort, Night of the Living Dead (which we'll cover here soon), the general mythology of zombies has drawn from several sources. One of the most influential sources for the Zombie Mythos was Capcom's Resident Evil, or Biohazard, as it is known in Japan, released in 1996 for the Playstation.
Why was RE so influential, and why is it so fondly remembered that it's had not one, but two remasterings (first on the Nintendo Gamecube, and more recently on PC in glorious HD)?
Find out after the jump!
Resident Evil began life as a remake of Capcom's 1989 Famicom cult favourite Sweet Home, a film-tie in about a film crew trying to document the restoration of works of art in the haunted Mamiya Mansion. The game invented many of the staple characteristics of the survival horror genre (such as restricted healing items and weapons, and a piece-together story) and had extremely gory and disturbing themes, and for this reason never secured a release outside Japan.
The game had built up a following and Capcom were well aware of how ahead of its time Sweet Home was; there was more fruit in that particular, haunted basket. Shinji Mikami, RE's creator, wanted to make an original story that took considerable influence from both Sweet Home, the first survival horror, and polygonal nightmare Alone in the Dark. Biohazard retained the trapped-in-a-mansion and rarity of useful items of its predecessor, swapping out the haunted mansion early in development for a science-gone-wrong angle of hidden laboratories and T-viruses.
The game concerned a unit of Special Tactics and Rescue Service (STARs) police officers looking for a missing unit of colleagues, who had been sent to investigate disturbing, cannibalistic murders in the Arklay Forest near Raccoon City. They find a downed helicopter and an eaten pilot, and are chased by a pack of rotting, zombified dogs into a foreboding mansion that's full of zombies and really obtuse puzzles.
Fondly remembered by many for its tense atmosphere and emphasis on survival, where meeting one single zombie was a challenge to be seriously weighed up (do you spend the bullets, or just run around? If you run around will you get bitten and have to use a green herb? Have you saved at a typewriter recently?) but it holds up rather shakily now. While the development team looked to Sweet Home for inspiration on horror, they looted Alone in the Dark for awful mechanics; the characters move like remote-control cars driven by a drunk and look like their car hit a truck full of polygons on their way to the mansion.
The puzzles are, when revisited, a bit odd (in that classic-adventure-game-combine-rubber-duck-with-corkscrew-to-patch-a-leak-in-a-rowing-boat kind of way). Only Umbrella Corp. employees had to start the day by taking a bronze statuette from the kitchen and inserting it into a recess on top of a gravestone in the private cemetery (?) to open the bookcase that leads to a lift that took them to the Giant Snake and Arachnid Research Lab where they work. I can barely operate the keyfob to get into the office in the morning.
God alone knows how they went to the toilet. Pushing suits of armour around a room is difficult when your back teeth are swimming.
The dialogue is God-awful, as are the FMV sequences in the original PS version, thankfully removed and replaced with goooorgeous pre-rendered cutscenes in later iterations and remakes. The atmosphere, however, is tense and excruciating. The sound of the footsteps down a corridor as Chris or Jill makes their way past that window resonates in many a fan's nightmares to this day. Empty rooms became chambers of horror through a restrictive use of sound and dark, gothic decor. It is easy to see that the mansion was originally designed to be a haunted house before switching to the 'virus outbreak' storyline. Seriously, who has a private graveyard?
RE is probably most influential in introducing the T-Virus. A practically-magical pathogen that zombifies humans, and makes everything else, from bats to gibbons to tarantulas to begonias grow really big and aggressive, designed as a super-soldier serum. The 'infection that makes people into zombies but also makes super-mutants too' trope should be familiar to even the most casual zombie fan, as will be the classic RE 'attempt to make super soldiers gone horribly wrong' plotline that they've been reusing for the last decade. It never works, but bless the Umbrella Corp's little cotton socks for trying again and again and again.
Resident Evil, the original, changed the zombie playing field. Few films and games have not felt its influence. It may not seem so great now but at the time the survival horror genre was in its infancy, and RE was the biggest kid in the playgroup. The reason it's so beloved is because when most people played it, there was nothing else like it. It set many of the survival horror formulas and has been copied and paid homage to so completely that it's hard to appreciate it for what it was when it was released. I'd like to talk about RE4 at some point later because that was the one that stuck with me best, but for now?
Dig out the PS1, dust of the Gamecube, or fire up Steam, and make a big Jill Sandwich. You are the Master of Unlocking. Get to work.
Shamble on.
While it all began with Romero's yet-to-be-surpassed 1969 indie effort, Night of the Living Dead (which we'll cover here soon), the general mythology of zombies has drawn from several sources. One of the most influential sources for the Zombie Mythos was Capcom's Resident Evil, or Biohazard, as it is known in Japan, released in 1996 for the Playstation.
Why was RE so influential, and why is it so fondly remembered that it's had not one, but two remasterings (first on the Nintendo Gamecube, and more recently on PC in glorious HD)?
Find out after the jump!
Resident Evil began life as a remake of Capcom's 1989 Famicom cult favourite Sweet Home, a film-tie in about a film crew trying to document the restoration of works of art in the haunted Mamiya Mansion. The game invented many of the staple characteristics of the survival horror genre (such as restricted healing items and weapons, and a piece-together story) and had extremely gory and disturbing themes, and for this reason never secured a release outside Japan.
The game had built up a following and Capcom were well aware of how ahead of its time Sweet Home was; there was more fruit in that particular, haunted basket. Shinji Mikami, RE's creator, wanted to make an original story that took considerable influence from both Sweet Home, the first survival horror, and polygonal nightmare Alone in the Dark. Biohazard retained the trapped-in-a-mansion and rarity of useful items of its predecessor, swapping out the haunted mansion early in development for a science-gone-wrong angle of hidden laboratories and T-viruses.
The game concerned a unit of Special Tactics and Rescue Service (STARs) police officers looking for a missing unit of colleagues, who had been sent to investigate disturbing, cannibalistic murders in the Arklay Forest near Raccoon City. They find a downed helicopter and an eaten pilot, and are chased by a pack of rotting, zombified dogs into a foreboding mansion that's full of zombies and really obtuse puzzles.
Fondly remembered by many for its tense atmosphere and emphasis on survival, where meeting one single zombie was a challenge to be seriously weighed up (do you spend the bullets, or just run around? If you run around will you get bitten and have to use a green herb? Have you saved at a typewriter recently?) but it holds up rather shakily now. While the development team looked to Sweet Home for inspiration on horror, they looted Alone in the Dark for awful mechanics; the characters move like remote-control cars driven by a drunk and look like their car hit a truck full of polygons on their way to the mansion.
The puzzles are, when revisited, a bit odd (in that classic-adventure-game-combine-rubber-duck-with-corkscrew-to-patch-a-leak-in-a-rowing-boat kind of way). Only Umbrella Corp. employees had to start the day by taking a bronze statuette from the kitchen and inserting it into a recess on top of a gravestone in the private cemetery (?) to open the bookcase that leads to a lift that took them to the Giant Snake and Arachnid Research Lab where they work. I can barely operate the keyfob to get into the office in the morning.
God alone knows how they went to the toilet. Pushing suits of armour around a room is difficult when your back teeth are swimming.
The dialogue is God-awful, as are the FMV sequences in the original PS version, thankfully removed and replaced with goooorgeous pre-rendered cutscenes in later iterations and remakes. The atmosphere, however, is tense and excruciating. The sound of the footsteps down a corridor as Chris or Jill makes their way past that window resonates in many a fan's nightmares to this day. Empty rooms became chambers of horror through a restrictive use of sound and dark, gothic decor. It is easy to see that the mansion was originally designed to be a haunted house before switching to the 'virus outbreak' storyline. Seriously, who has a private graveyard?
RE is probably most influential in introducing the T-Virus. A practically-magical pathogen that zombifies humans, and makes everything else, from bats to gibbons to tarantulas to begonias grow really big and aggressive, designed as a super-soldier serum. The 'infection that makes people into zombies but also makes super-mutants too' trope should be familiar to even the most casual zombie fan, as will be the classic RE 'attempt to make super soldiers gone horribly wrong' plotline that they've been reusing for the last decade. It never works, but bless the Umbrella Corp's little cotton socks for trying again and again and again.
Resident Evil, the original, changed the zombie playing field. Few films and games have not felt its influence. It may not seem so great now but at the time the survival horror genre was in its infancy, and RE was the biggest kid in the playgroup. The reason it's so beloved is because when most people played it, there was nothing else like it. It set many of the survival horror formulas and has been copied and paid homage to so completely that it's hard to appreciate it for what it was when it was released. I'd like to talk about RE4 at some point later because that was the one that stuck with me best, but for now?
Dig out the PS1, dust of the Gamecube, or fire up Steam, and make a big Jill Sandwich. You are the Master of Unlocking. Get to work.
Shamble on.
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