Does Resident Evil still scare in 2013?

32 Bits is a series where I revisit the most popular games in the past console generations, from the launch of the original Playstation to the last days of the Xbox 360. Why?

• To chart the evolution of games.

• To destroy people’s nostalgic views by playing the “classics” they all know…alongside the detritus everyone played at the time, but no one remembers.

• To rediscover games unjustly forgotten by history.

The time is March 1996: three months into the Playstation’s first full year. The Nintendo 64 is several months away; while Sega’s Saturn system is fading fast.

Usually I review two games in each post, but sometimes a game deserves my complete attention due to its importance or quality (or lack thereof). Resident Evil is one of those games. The only thing the Playstation games I play have in common: membership in Sony’s Greatest Hits line, or its European and Japanese equivalents. These games all sold at least 150,000 copies and are a guide to what everyone played then.

Some of these games are remembered fondly, some are despised and many are forgotten completely. Why were they popular then, and what can we learn from them today? Find out in 32 Bits.

Playstation #24:
Resident Evil

Developed and published by Capcom

Released: March 1996 (Japan/NA), August 1996 (Europe)
Best-seller in: North America (Greatest Hits), Europe (Platinum)

“For the first time in your life, a video game has done something more than entertain or distract you. It has bypassed your limbic system and gone straight for the spinal canal. You lean back, cautiously. You are twenty-three years old. You have played a lot of games. Right now, all those games, all the irrecoverable eons you invested in them, seem…like nothing more than a collective prologue.”

-Tom Bissell describing his first experience playing Resident Evil, in his book Extra Lives.

Resident Evil began development as an unassuming remake of a old NES roleplaying game, and was initially conceived as a first-person shooter. When it came out in ’96, it would become one of the most important games ever made.

Resident Evil’s gory violence and tense themes created the idea of games being made for adults. It created, or crystallized, an entire genre. Yet its first revolution was its story – how it was presented, and that it had one at all.

Resident Evil drew inspiration from two key sources. The game began as a remake of Sweet Home, a RPG by Capcom. This NES game from 1989 followed a group of treasure hunters exploring a haunted mansion. The idea of solving puzzles in an environment patrolled by monsters was carried over, as were the ideas of inventory management and even details like the game’s door-opening animation.

Yet despite this, Sweet Home is still a turn-based RPG. The clearest gameplay antecedent to Resident Evil is the 1992 Infogrames PC game Alone in the Dark. The first survival horror game, it also featured two playable characters – a man and a woman – and Resident Evil‘s movement system, where you turn in place and move forwards & backwards like a tank, was lifted directly from this earlier game. Yet this game did not reach the level of influence and popularity Resident Evil would achieve. Though it created the field, Alone in the Dark would be forgotten in the wake of its indirect offspring’s fame.

While there were zombies in Alone in the Dark that game’s horrors were largely inspired by the ancient gods and alien entities of H.P. Lovecraft. Likewise, Sweet Home drew on typical haunted house lore (Sweet Home was based on a Japanese film from the same year; the film’s director and producer supervised the game, and neither film or game ever left Japan officially). The monsters in Resident Evil are more 50s sci-fi than cosmic horror.

You play as either Jill or Chris, members of a police unit dispatched to investigate the disappearance of an earlier team. They take refuge in a mansion, whose halls are filled with zombies and other dangerous creatures. Within this mansion the character you choose unravels the mystery of who created these monsters and why.

Barry advises Jill on how to proceed.

Jill is substantially easier to play as than Chris; she gets two extra inventory slots and a lockpick. Chris is stronger and faster, but has reduced inventory space and doesn’t even start with a gun. Each has an exclusive weapon: Jill has access to an useful grenade launcher throughout the game, while Chris can use a flamethrower for a single boss fight. It’s hardly a equal match.

Both characters have a partner. Jill’s is Barry, who often rescues her from peril and shoulders the bulk of the game’s cheesiest dialogue. Chris is paired with Rebecca, a medic from the missing team who also rescues the player from peril – but this time, they’re playable. At one point, a giant snake poisons your character. Barry will cure Jill off-screen, no input needed; the player must control Rebecca directly and have her fetch the serum for Chris. Both partners can die if the player isn’t careful.

Your allies are an irregular presence; Resident Evil is largely a solitary affair. The story is presented via files and notes you discover while exploring the empty world, now a familiar storytelling method in games (an empty world full of notes and enemies is too familiar a storytelling format today, but that’s neither here nor there).

When you do meet a NPC – such as the missing members of Bravo Team that you’re searching for – they’re immediately killed off. None of the characters really seem to care, however. In the opening scene, the player character you didn’t pick goes missing – and is never mentioned again, unless you rescue them in the game’s final moments. At times it’s hard to even remember that the character’s mission is to find these missing people they hardly seem to care about.

A memorable surprise at the beginning of the game.

Resident Evil’s storytelling ambitions are pegged at the level of a B-movie, the kind of schlocky horror fest you would see at a drive-in or grindhouse. The mansion, with its inexplicable traps and hidden chambers, is straight out of an old haunted house tale. The Resident Evil mythos boil down to mad science gone awry; the only radical part about the game’s story is that it exists, that a mainstream console action game would care to place effort into its plot.

“He’s sleeping with the ultimate failure!”

-Chris Redfield, Resident Evil

The voice acting in Resident Evil is infamously bad; I had heard snippets before, but they didn’t prepare me for experiencing it first-hand. It’s not just that the game’s writing is cheesy; the line delivery is surreal. Emphasis is placed randomly, with no regard for which words in a sentence are actually important. Each line also loads separately, creating awkward pauses in the middle of conversations. Characters don’t act like people would. Your partner will wander over a giant snake’s decaying body and obliviously ask if you’ve seen anything interesting. Resident Evil’s cinemas feel like they were written, directed and acted by aliens who were handed a copy of Plan 9 from Outer Space and extrapolated human behavior from the speech patterns of the Amazing Criswell.

What was surprising to me, as someone who had never played the original Resident Evil before, is how intense the actual gameplay is. This is the game that coined “survival horror” as a term.  Yet while other survival horror games would place the emphasis on the horror aspect, such as the psychological terrors of Silent Hill, Resident Evil stresses survival.

This is a game that was designed to be clunky and frustrating. Movement entails rotating in the direction you want and moving forward or backward, which is often awkward in a fight – especially given the game’s reliance on pre-set camera angles; often enemies are lurking just off-frame, out of view. You are isolated in claustrophobic hallways and chambers, where navigating around monsters is difficult and sometimes impossible, sometimes one that’s initially hidden. Each new screen could hold some new, implacable threat. Once in the guardhouse area, I opened the door to a bar and saw nothing threatening. Then I moved further in, and a gigantic spider dropped from the ceiling.  I couldn’t run away fast enough.

Fighting a zombie in the mansion.

Resources are limited. In my first run, I ran out of ammo completely and had to start over – even if you know where every box of shells is, you must ration your ammunition. In 1996 players were accustomed to killing everything they saw; Resident Evil radically posits that running away from your enemies is often a more intelligent choice than taking the bullets to kill them. For the first time in mainstream console gaming, the player was often left helpless.

Most controversially Resident Evil limits how often you can save: each save requires an item known as an ink ribbon, and they’re in short supply. You may save only a handful of times, so even the simple act of saving your game becomes strategic.

These mechanics – limited saves, scarce ammo, cramped surroundings – are, on a purely objective level, awful design decisions. On an emotional level, these frustrating decisions brilliantly create a feeling of intensity. The monsters aren’t scary in Resident Evil – what’s scary is the game itself, how one mistake can force you to repeat hours of gameplay, how you can mess up so thoroughly that you must abandon your near-unwinnable save file. Death in Resident Evil is punishing, not a slap on the wrist, but life is no cake walk either. Seemingly bad decisions create the emotional tension at the heart of the game.

And just when you’re used to the sluggish zombies that litter the mansion, when you’ve killed most of them and cleared the hallways of any danger, Resident Evil shakes the player out of their complacency by repopulating the mansion with Hunters, reptilian creatures that move swiftly and can kill you in seconds. It’s an audacious move: everything you’ve learned so far, all those hard-won lessons, suddenly become worthless in the face of these new foes.

Resident Evil has a smattering of non-zombie enemies and true to its b-movie roots many are gigantic animals. There’s a giant snake lurking in the walls and huge spiders that drop from the ceiling. Ravenous dogs leap through windows, while carnivorous crows and overgrown wasps briefly give chase. One of the game’s odder moments comes in the courtyard. As the player walks down an ordinary path, snakes start dropping from the trees. Not giant snakes, just ordinary sized ones that you can quickly evade. At least they provide a brief shock.

Solving a puzzle as crows caw ominously above.

Resident Evil’s puzzles are famously inscrutable in their logic. A fountain will have two places for medallions in it. Where are these medallions? Inside books, of course – books that give no indication that anything’s hidden inside. Often clues are hidden away until you inspect an item via the menu, a indefensibly frustrating decision.

It’s easy to piece together what to do and less intuitive to figure out where to get the necessary items. It makes you wonder why anyone would design a mansion this way. Taking a loaded shotgun off the wall in one room makes the ceiling collapse. You’d think a shotgun would be handy to have readily available in case of a crisis in a secret lab breeding monsters, but to the mansion’s architect it’s far more logical to place a broken shotgun on the next floor so you can swap it out for the loaded one. Of course.

The accomplishment of director Shinji Mikami and company is staggering. Just two years into the Playstation’s life, at the dawn of 3D gaming, they created a wholly new experience. One based on suspense instead of wild violence, one that placed players in a position of uncertainty and powerlessness. When games were thought of as kid’s toys, they made a bloody one of complexity, aimed squarely at adults. They fit a story into this new game, and created a new method of telling video game stories. Capcom set out to retread a forgotten RPG, and in the process reinvented mainstream gaming.

Yet Resident Evil isn’t just important. Games that trade in innovation alone seldom age well. Resident Evil isn’t in that class: a challenging tour through a well-realized world of survival horror, one that challenges the player to think ahead only to shock them with new twists, Resident Evil was, and is, great.

Must-play, in 1996 and in 2013.

notes

• Resident Evil was a massive success and work immediately began on a sequel. Resident Evil 2 was about a year into development when it was abruptly cancelled; Capcom started work on a brand-new Resident Evil 2, later released in 1998.

• To make up for the delay, Capcom created a “Director’s Cut”. This version introduced a “Arranged” mode that shifted around items and puzzles to make it more challenging for experienced players. It also came with a demo for Resident Evil 2. The Greatest Hits edition of Resident Evil is the Director’s Cut, not the original. I chose to play the original since that’s the one everyone played first, and I won’t be covering the Director’s Cut.

• Resident Evil was later remade for the Nintendo Gamecube with many changes and new, rather amazing graphics. I will also be playing that game, if I get as far as the next console generation (it will take me years to reach the Gamecube).

The disappointing Neptune sequence.

• One of the best improvements over the original in the remake concerns a room full of sharks. I was disappointed by the original – you enter a water-filled room after much ominous build-up, but by the time a giant shark strikes you’re already out the door. In the remake this tank room is expanded into an intense “aqua ring” sequence.

• Both character’s stories have multiple possible endings. They can escape alone, save their partner, save the other player character or save both characters. Another variable is whether the mansion is destroyed or left intact. Of course, multiple endings become problematic when a standalone game becomes a franchise with a definite canon. Capcom’s official line is that Jill, Chris and their partners Barry & Rebecca all survived. This isn’t a possible ending in any version of Resident Evil. When you play as Jill, Rebecca is never mentioned. When you play as Chris, Barry is missing and presumed dead.
• Also of note: this game explicitly kills off a character would will return in later installments as the series’ chief antagonist.
• I’ve mentioned before that while I owned an original Playstation, it was only at the tail end of the system’s life and I only owned a handful of games before moving on to the Playstation 2. Part of why I chose to analyze this console generation’s history was because had little first hand experience with it, and no nostalgia clouding my judgments. Resident Evil was a game I never played or even saw first-hand in those days, but I read avidly about it. Alas, my family understood software ratings so my ten year old self would never get to play it. Still, I read about it in books and magazines; I remember reading about Rebecca saving Chris from the snake’s venom and imagining what the game might be like. My only glimpses of it were passing footage in ads, and in TV news reports about violent video games. Even while I played Resident Evil 4 years later, I never touched the original. So now that I finally have played it, I must say: the game I imagined in those young days was…not far off from reality, surprisingly.

____________________________________________________________________________

Next Sunday: Panzer Dragoon II for the Sega Saturn.