Resident Evil - Volume 1 E-Book

Nicolas Courcier

• Herausgeber: Third Editions
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A thorough analysis of the first survival-horror game, Resident Evil.

Every passionate gamer knows about the Resident Evil saga. Born in 1996, the series count at least 10 major episodes mainly inspired by the work of George A. Romero. The games take place in the United States infested with zombies. The first episode was so terrifying that it inspired the birth of a new genre: the survival-horror games. As in every Third Éditions’ book, a video game saga is analyzed and decrypted. More than 200 pages to know everything about Resident Evil: the behind-the-scenes development, the gameplay, the story, the universe.

Go back to the heart of this great saga, dive into the mysteries of Raccoon City to meet the heroes who fought the evil corporation Umbrella. The figure of the undead never ceases to fascinate.


ABOUT THE AUTHORS


Nicolas Courcier launched his first magazine, Console Syndrome, with Mehdi El Kanafi in 2004. Nicolas has since published more than twenty books devoted to flagship series, many of which he himself co-authored: Zelda. Chronicles of a legendary saga, Metal Gear Solid. A cult work by Hideo Kojima and The Legend of Final Fantasy VII and IX. Since 2015, he has developed his editorial approach based on the analysis of the great video game sagas within the new publishing house co-founded with Mehdi: Third.

Bruno Provezza has been a fan of video games and fantasy films since he was a child. He was editor-in-chief of the official website of Mad Movies magazine, before joining the editorial team of the monthly magazine. He directed their special issue devoted to video games. He co-wrote Resident Evil. Des Zombies et des hommes, Bienvenue à Silent Hill. Journey to the Heart of Hell, Uncharted. Diary of an Explorer and Professor Polymathus in a brief history of video games for Third. 

Leseprobe

cover

Title page

This book is dedicated to all those who work to keep our imaginations alive.

Forewordby Jaume Balagueró

TO PLAY is to imagine another world and to believe that you are part of it, whether we are playing as ourselves or as another character in a different, invented setting. To play is to dream up and experience adventures, to suffer, savor, pillage, and fight, to win–and lose–but always having fun.

That’s what I did when I was a child: I built imaginary worlds around me, and lived in them. It’s a fascinating experience, without a doubt, but it does have one weakness: you can never really be surprised, because the person who experiences the imaginary world is the same person who invented it. They own the imagination that dreamed up this universe and set its rules. They are masters of their own destiny, a destiny that is completely within their control. Everything is foreseen. And this is why the fruits of our imaginations can never be truly perfect.

And then there came this game, which would change everything. It was a fictional world that contained new rules, a unique experience in which we, the players, would be tasked with playing a role that we’d never played before.

The very first time we encountered this game, we were drawn into an atmosphere, into a universe, that was completely unknown to us. This time, we were faced with a different kind of challenge: it was up to us to move forwards, up to us to discover each terrifying new location, every twist in the mysterious plot. And better yet: as long as we faced it with courage, we controlled how the story unfolded. We needed to be brave, to feel the fear–which was very real–and do it anyway…

From this point forward, it was no longer a matter of simply moving and fighting. For the very first time, we were expected to manage our inventory for the duration of the adventure: to collect ammunition, weapons, medicinal herbs, and typewriter ink ribbons in order to stay alive, as well as the mysterious items needed to solve puzzles. Our success hinged to no small degree on our ability to manage all of that. For the first time ever, it was all up to us. We were now a fundamental, and active, component of this horror story, a story that also existed in real life, because we were part of it. It was a feeling of involvement and agency that would captivate millions of players.

The game in question was, of course, Resident Evil, and it laid the solid foundations for a whole new genre: survival horror. Similar games had no doubt come before, but this was the one that transcended all earlier attempts, transforming them into a fascinating, perfect experience.

The themes found in the game would continue to grip the public imagination for many years to come: an epidemic caused by an unknown virus, global conspiracies, mysterious corporations with dark, dark secrets, and hordes of ultraviolent enemies completely devoid of conscience.

Since then, this prodigious game has given birth to a variety of series and literary adaptations, a film series, and swathes of licensed products. Resident Evil will go down in history as one of the most influential games in the evolution of the video gaming industry; it is still today an iconic game and an integral part of modern pop culture.

But more than that, it enabled so many young adults (myself included) to keep their inner child alive, to keep playing and experiencing terrifying adventures, and to keep fighting monstrous enemies without drawing attention to ourselves. And for that alone, it was time well spent.

g Jaume Balagueró

Jaume Balagueró grew up in Barcelona, where he studied photography and film. Graduating in communication sciences in 1991, he began his career as a film journalist and radio presenter, before embarking on a career as a filmmaker with The Nameless, his first feature-length film that immediately established his reputation as one of the up-and-coming hopes in Spanish horror. In 2002, Jaume Balagueró directed Darkness, an international joint-production, followed three years later by Fragile. In 2008, he jointly directed [REC], a horror movie filmed as a found-footage news report, with Paco Plaza. The film would go on to be an international success. The duo returned with [REC]² in 2009, before Jaume Balagueró took the reins of the series alone in 2014, writing and directing [REC]4, after taking a break from the series in 2011 with the horror move Sleep Tight.

Preface

WHILE the golden age of 16-bit consoles was coming to an end, with their captivating 2D graphics and their colorful and friendly–some would say “childlike”–worlds, video games were about to be transformed forever. Coinciding with the arrival of the PlayStation and Saturn consoles, the platform was entering its adolescence with a bang, bringing with it more mature games with more polished content and themes, games that were darker in nature and more cinematic in feel. Alongside Tomb Raider, the Resident Evil saga quickly established its place in this new wave of gaming, while simultaneously cementing the popularity of a genre that had been around for a few years already, with Alone in the Dark: survival horror.

Becoming one of the most popular genres on consoles of the 32-bit generation, survival horror would give birth to many offspring, the vast majority of which were thinly veiled imitations of the groundbreaking game by Shinji Mikami. For yes, just as the Metal Gear saga is inseparable from Hideo Kojima, the Resident Evil series remains indelibly linked to the name of its creator, a man with a complex personality known just as much as a demanding taskmaster as for his characteristic plain-speaking. The first installment of Resident Evil and its sequels rekindled the public fascination with zombies, these living dead with their putrid flesh, which have since become so ubiquitous in games, movies, graphic novels, and TV series (for proof, look only to the incredible success of The Walking Dead). Capcom’s saga achieved the status of a genuine pop culture phenomenon with, as we will discover in this book, a reach that expands far beyond the world of video games. It is fair to say that Resident Evil made its mark.

g Nicolas Courcier & Mehdi El Kanafi

Since their childhoods, Nicolas Courcier and Mehdi El Kanafi have been passionate about printed media and wasted no time in launching their first magazine, Console Syndrome, in 2004. Following five issues with a limited circulation in and around Toulouse, they decided to found a publishing house under the same name. One year later, the little company was acquired by Pix’n Love, a leading publisher of video game books. Over the course of these four years in publishing, Nicolas and Mehdi published more than 20 books about leading series of games, many of which they authored themselves: Zelda. The History of a Legendary Saga, Metal Gear Solid. Hideo Kojima’s Magnum Opus, and The Legend of Final Fantasy VII and IX. Since 2015, they have continued their publishing activity with books analyzing the greatest video game series, published under the name of the new company they founded together: Third.

g Bruno Provezza

Obsessed with video games and fantasy films from a very young age, from 2002-2006 Bruno Provezza served as the editor-in-chief of the official Mad Movies magazine website, before compiling its special edition: When Video Games Make Films, and becoming a permanent member of staff on the monthly print edition. Having occasionally freelanced for Gameblog.fr between 2008 and 2013, he also works as a translator for the publishers Flammarion and Pix’n Love.

CHAPTER I Capcom, Shinji Mikami, and the Birth of Survival Horror

WITHIN the pantheon of legendary video game companies, Capcom stands peerless. The firm from Osaka boasts almost 40 years of expertise in video games, and its stable includes some of the biggest franchises in the industry. So how did Capcom come to be?

A Promising Start

It was in 1979 that Kenzo Tsujimoto made a decision to take charge of his future, and on May 30 that same year, he founded his own company specializing in the production and sale of electronic games. And so was born IRM corporation, followed by its subsidiary, Japan Capsule Computer, in 1981. Three years later, the subsidiary surpassed its parent company and became “Capcom”, a contraction of its original name (Capsule Computer). Based in Osaka, the company quickly came to specialize in video games, beginning with games destined primarily for the arcade market, the Commodore 64, and the Nintendo NES. Capcom’s first game was a shoot ‘em up called Vulgus, which landed in smoky arcades in 1984. This first attempt, while far from enthralling, laid the foundations for the success of the company and of Tsujimoto, who today serves as its CEO. But 1984 was also the year of another pivotal event in Capcom’s history: let go by Konami (a competitor company), a young man by the name of Yoshiki Okamoto came to pad out the company roster. The first game he released for his new employer was 1942, a vertically scrolling shoot ‘em up that would go down as a classic.

Success Right out of the Gate

From there, the company released one hit after another, both in the arcades and on the Nintendo Famicom. Over the course of these early years of growth, iconic games like Commando and Ghosts ‘n Goblins proved a hit with Japanese gamers. Ghosts ‘n Goblins would even be the first game to receive a console port from Capcom. In 1987, the first Street Fighter was released, passing largely under the radar. Indeed, the public of the time only had eyes for the NES and its Megaman. This game from Akira Kitamura featured a robot as its main character: instantly recognizable, Megaman would waste no time in becoming the company’s mascot. Over the next few years, a number of equally well-known games were released (Final Fight, Strider, SonSon, to name but a few), with arcade games remaining the publisher’s focal point. Anyone who was around back in the day will certainly remember, among the most popular systems, the famous Capcom Play System (or CPS) accompanied by a number that grew as technology advanced. The CPS I was also the platform that the 1991 brawler, Captain Commando was programmed for, a title whose abbreviation mirrored that of the brand. August 1985 saw another pivotal event in Capcom’s history, when the Japanese firm decided to found its Capcom USA subsidiary. This desire to open up to the world would come to be a trademark of the company from Osaka and would ensure it was able to keep prospering throughout almost 40 years.

Sweet Home, a Horror Game

In 1989, Capcom released Sweet Home on the Famicom, a horror RPG inspired by the film of the same name directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. In terms of gameplay, it was similar to that found in the Enix RPG, Dragon Quest: random, turn-based battles in first person and a need for intelligent inventory management if progress was to be made… In some ways, it was also reminiscent of Maniac Mansion by LucasArts, released in 1987: players could select from a variety of young characters to form their team; you could trigger conversations between the characters and inspect your surroundings using dedicated controls, and a number of endings were possible based on which members of your group managed to complete the quest. The adventure in Sweet Home takes place inside a haunted mansion, and certain elements of the game would later feature in the first Resident Evil: a cut-scene every time you open a door; lots of notes to be found hidden in the background that provide details of what is going on; a limited inventory; and special skills for different characters that enable them to perform particular actions. Once you start looking at the roots of Resident Evil, Sweet Home stands out as its first clear influence.

The Publisher from Osaka Powers Up

The year is 1991, and Capcom seems to have achieved its goal of becoming a serious player in the videogame industry. And yet, a game that would become an all-time classic was about to explode on the arcade scene, and later the Super Nintendo. Of course we are talking about the legendary Street Fighter II, a genuine cult-classic that cemented fighting games as a genre in their own right. But Capcom chose not to rest on its laurels and, still under the impetus of Okamoto, diversified its production. It should also be noted that a swathe of partnerships with Disney helped to expand Capcom’s fan base, which encompassed everyone from the most ardent arcade gamers to Japanese schoolchildren. The game that best represents this period is without any doubt Aladdin, a platform game released on the Super Nintendo. In 1993, Capcom also entered the traditional RPG market with Breath of Fire, a J-RPG that would give rise to four sequels, all centering on the adventures of Ryu, the hero who could transform into a dragon.

Alone in the Dark: Survival Horror, French-Style

In 1992, a game developed by Frédérick Raynal and published by Infogrames was released on PC. Its title was Alone in the Dark, and although the term had yet to be invented (by Capcom’s marketing department), it is generally seen as the very first survival horror game. Alone in the Dark was an adventure game first and foremost, with a much greater focus on solving puzzles than on combat. What’s more, most encounters with the zombies that populated the game environment (a few dozen, at most) could be avoided with a little bit of thought. The game was also surprising from a technical standpoint: while the characters were modeled in 3D, something that was still unusual back then, the backgrounds made use of pre-rendered 3D. This was a technique that enabled the camera to be placed in a carefully selected location for specific viewing angles that were used to generate and maintain a feeling of stress. With regard to the atmosphere, it was not too far removed from the fiction of Lovecraft, and the original project even began life as an official license for this unique fictional universe. And while Shinji Mikami maintained for many years that he was unaware of the existence of Alone in the Dark when he designed the first Resident Evil, in an interview with LeMonde.fr on October 14, 2014, the man behind Resident Evil admitted the influence of Frédérick Raynal’s game for the very first time. Mikami recalls how “When Sony announced the technical specifications and the number of 3D elements that could be shown on screen, we were skeptical. I redesigned the game based on the principle that the console would be 50% less powerful than announced, and opted for a first person shooter, because that meant one less character on the screen: we just needed to display the backgrounds and the enemies in 3D. […] Then I played Alone in the Dark, which had fixed backgrounds. It was really interesting, because it allowed more scope for expression. The next step was to adapt Resident Evil to use this technique. […]” He would later admit that, without Alone in the Dark, “Resident Evil would probably have ended up a first person shooter.”1 It then came to light that Capcom and Infogrames came to an agreement for Capcom to keep the French game’s influence on Resident Evil a secret, but Mikami kept repeating that his main influence for the game was Sweet Home and that the atmosphere had the films of George A. Romero to thank, in particular Dawn of the Dead, which was his greatest source of inspiration.

Doctor Hauzer

The influence of another Japanese game is also apparent in the creation of Resident Evil, that game being Doctor Hauzer, released on the 3DO in 1994. Developed by Kenichiro Hayashi at Riverhill Soft and published by Panasonic, Doctor Hauzer was basically a carbon-copy of Frédérick Raynal’s game. As such, it was an adventure game with an oppressive atmosphere where the protagonist must navigate a mansion all alone. This time, however, there were no enemies to defeat, only an abundance of traps to avoid. The story places the player in the residence of Doctor Hauzer, a famous archaeologist who has mysteriously disappeared. It was another game with carefully positioned camera angles, but here the player could choose to change their point of view at any time: first person, top-down, or alternating between fixed viewing angles. Doctor Hauzer’s main point of departure from the Alone in the Dark template was in its technical development: here, the whole game was 3D rendered in real-time. The player character’s face was also animated, enabling him to display a limited range of expressions. And while the rendering was still highly rudimentary, the game’s visual appearance evokes what would, a few years later, become known as cel shading. At the end of the day, the game would be known mainly for its delicate controls and… dead slow gameplay. However, a great many aspects of Hayashi’s game would be found in Resident Evil: the same cut-scene when the player picks something up (the camera zooms in and the item rotates), certain kinds of puzzles (including one involving a key hidden in a clock), as well as the cinematic cut-scene whenever a door is opened, although this was first seen in Sweet Home.

A New Era: CD-ROM Hits the Scene

1994. Having released a plethora of iconic titles in every segment of the market (for arcade machines, as well as both SEGA and Nintendo consoles), Capcom had certainly left its hallmark on the “golden age of Japanese video games.” At a time when the next generation of consoles could be seen on the horizon, the specialists of the day were talking about a revolution in the architecture of 32-bit consoles (PlayStation and Saturn), which would usher in the era of the CD-ROM. Once again, the Japanese publisher would be ready, proving able to foresee this shift towards the kinds of games that would be popular with gamers in the late 20th century. With the PlayStation, the market opened up to a wider audience, one that was more adult and eager for new experiences. It was then that, in 1996, Capcom gave the world the first installment in what would become the Resident Evil series. Developed under the leadership of Shinji Mikami, the game would propel the PlayStation to the forefront of the gaming scene and help forge the “rebellious” image of Ken Kutaragi’s console.

Shinji Mikami, the Father of Survival Horror, Experienced a Troubled Childhood

Shinji Mikami was born on August 11, 1965, in Yamaguchi, a prefecture near Kyoto in western Honshu. His childhood was marked by action films, and Bruce Lee films in particular. On that subject, Mikami has spoken about how, when he was a child, “When I watched Bruce Lee’s films I got so worked up, I wanted to dish out slaps to everyone! ”2 And unfortunately, violence was something the young Shinji Mikami faced on a daily basis: “I remember one night when I went to bed without doing my homework – my dad kicked me out of bed in the middle of the night and told me to go outside. So I did, in my pajamas without any shoes on, and he told me to stand in front of the car. Then he started chasing me around in the car, and he wound up having me run about five or six kilometers, all the way to the seashore by our house. Once we hit the coast, he drove off without saying a word, so I had to walk home by myself in my pajamas. If you think about it, if the police had seen this barefoot boy in pajamas being chased by a guy in a car, they would’ve arrested him on the spot, wouldn’t they? ”3

Despite a troubled upbringing, Mikami persevered with his studies and graduated from Doshisha University in Kyoto, even though he had failed the entrance exams two years in a row. An inveterate arcade gamer, it was only now that Mikami had his first encounter with Capcom games, in the form of Ghosts ‘n Goblins and 1942. The young gamer was enthralled. And the way he came into contact with the video game publisher is original in and of itself: “A friend of mine had found a flier advertising some kind of job fair-slash-buffet party Capcom was holding at the Hilton and he gave it to me because he knew I liked games. I went mainly because I wanted to eat at the Hilton for free, but once I started talking to Capcom people, really getting in depth about the work they do, I thought it sounded pretty neat. So I applied to both Capcom and Nintendo, and it turned out the second round of interviews for both companies were held on the same day, and I chose Capcom. It’s likely for the better because I probably never had a chance with Nintendo – it took a company like Capcom to pick me up.”4

Understated Beginnings

The year is 1990 and Shinji Mikami launched his career at Capcom with a little Game Boy game called Capcom Quiz: Hatena? no Daibôken. Lead times for production were very tight, and his superiors had granted him just one month to make the game. The young Mikami, however, was already a perfectionist and refused to sign off on the game until even the tiniest snags had been ironed out. Under pressure to finish the game, it would end up taking him 3 months to deliver. He even feared that the game would be canceled due to the delay, and that would be that.

The following year, Shinji Mikami was tasked with adapting Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the Game Boy. While the game was a hit in Europe and the USA, it went unnoticed in Japan, resulting in the designer’s popularity taking a hit in his home country. Capcom then tasked him with developing a Formula 1 game for the Western market. At first, Mikami was delighted with this new project, being as he was a big fan of racing games, but the development soon turned into a nightmare: with a desire to make a game of extraordinary quality, he pushed his team to their limits, showing himself to be extremely demanding and always pushing for more. Unsurprisingly, the project accrued delays. Eventually, the programmers confessed that they could do no more, sending Mikami into a blind rage. He then threatened his team with canceling everything which, due to these repeated delays, is exactly what happened after eight months of development. Mikami now admits that back then he lacked maturity and acknowledges that he was unable to see the technical limitations of the computers he and his team were working on.

The Disney Years

In 1993, Shinji Mikami was once again entrusted with the video game adaptation of a Disney film. This time, it was Aladdin, which would land on the Super Nintendo as a masterful creation from Mikami. However, the game also had to compete with the Genesis (or Mega Drive) version of the same game, developed by one David Perry. The American game received better reviews than Mikami’s version, leaving the designer smarting and depriving him of the success he deserved. It would not be until 2014 that the proud Japanese game designer would admit, in an interview with Polygon, that Perry had made the better game. Mikami’s next job was nevertheless a game with another Disney license: Goof Troop (1994). Bemoaning the game’s lack of ambition, Mikami saw this project as punishment for his previous performance. While these years failed to bring Mikami glory or recognition, the “Mickey years” would have an impact on the next step in the game designer’s career, one that he would later acknowledge: “I think I can be grateful to Disney for these games, because the pent up frustration amassed during those years helped to create Resident Evil.” Despite his lackluster success, Mikami began to earn a reputation within Capcom for his perfectionism, dogged determination, and the lengths to which he would go to make a game with no glitches. His strong character and skills as a game designer would catch the eye of Tokuro Fujiwara,5 who came to interview him about a brand new license he wanted to produce for Sony’s new console, the PlayStation. The title would be the spiritual sequel to Sweet Home. Fujiwara tells of how he had asked Mikami if he hated being scared, and how the young man had replied to the man who would become his mentor with an honest “Yes!”6 Fujiwara goes on to confirm that he would not have chosen Mikami if his answer had been anything else. It turns out that this conversation would be the genesis of Shinji Mikami’s masterpiece.

1. http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2014/10/14/shinji-mikami-aux-sources-du-jeu-d-horreur_4502400_4408996.html.

2. http://www.gamekult.com/actu/tgs-interview-shinji-mikami-A87569.html.

3. http://www.giantbomb.com/shinji-mikami/3040-32999/.

4. http://www.giantbomb.com/shinji-mikami/3040-32999/.

5. Fujiwara, at Capcom since 1983, is the man behind Ghosts ‘n Goblins, among other titles.

6. http://www.glitterberri.com/developer-interviews/tokuro-fujiwara/.

CHAPTER II The Roots of (Resident) Evil

THE BEGINNINGS of the Resident Evil series are worthy of a novel, littered as the development of each game is with problems, U-turns, and internal conflict. Shinji Mikami’s explosive personality, combined with his legendary perfectionism, do, of course, play a major role in these development complications. However, one thing is for certain: without him, the series would never have been so well-polished nor would it have garnered so much popularity as a result.

The Origins of Horror

Shinji Mikami immediately accepted Fujiwara’s offer of making a spiritual sequel to Sweet Home, despite having a few reservations about the game’s prospects for success in light of the original’s mediocre sales. His superior reassured him with the news that Capcom did not count on selling more than 150,000 copies of the game, a number that was very low in comparison to sales figures for other Capcom titles of the time. What mattered to Capcom was not so much releasing a major title, but rather the exploration of new horizons. It was also thanks to these modest ambitions that Mikami could find himself leading the project, at a time when he lacked the reputation usually required for such a position.

Mikami took the time to identify, analyze, and understand the mechanisms behind Sweet Home’s gameplay, and with very few instructions from the company beyond making a similar game, he found himself with a lot of freedom. He spent the first six months on the project working alone to come up with a clear picture of the direction he wanted the project to take. But in those days, Capcom’s immediate concerns lay somewhere else entirely. The publisher demanded a complete storyline before launching the development phase, an idea which Mikami found worse than useless! Our game designer wanted just one thing: to frighten people! Hence his decision to set the game in a haunted mansion. In his opinion, a complex storyline was superfluous to giving players a fright. Armed with this conviction, Mikami presented a story to Capcom that featured nothing more than a beginning, an end, and a few intermediate actions, and that was all. In the end, the game would retain these fragments of Mikami’s imagination as the basis for its story: members of an elite unit trapped inside a mansion inhabited by genetically modified monsters. And while Mikami was certainly inspired by Sweet Home, he chose to do away with the fantastical and supernatural aspects of the game. By his own admission, Mikami had no interest in making a game about ghosts: he wanted the danger to be tangible and clearly defined, “like in Alien or Jaws” (see Chapter 7). With this in mind, zombies quickly became the preferred option. It should be noted that while he was a student, Mikami had seen and liked George Romero’s famous Dawn of the Dead, which had left a lasting impression thanks to its simple concept: what would we do if zombies invaded our everyday lives? Romero had also stated that “The scariest thing is ourselves.” Mikami believed that whenever anyone watched a horror film, they could not help but find the way the characters react ridiculous: “If I was in that situation, I wouldn’t do that.” His aim with Resident Evil, then, was to make a horror film within which players could react just as they would like. In the first version of Resident Evil, there were plans to include all different kinds of zombies, even kids! But Shinji Mikami would soon change his mind: he thought the idea might be too shocking and therefore somewhat out of tune with his desire for a believable story.

Capcom’s new horror franchise gradually began to take shape. With the guiding principles of the game in place, Mikami assembled a team of around 20 people who would work on the project for a whole year, testing the various approaches dreamed up by its designer. In its first incarnation, the game adopted the trappings of an FPS game;1 development could begin, but the first playtests were far from convincing. Technically, the game was a triumph, but the first person view failed to deliver the desired levels of fear. It was too farremoved from the initial concept, and Mikami demanded that its development start again from scratch. The programmers were stunned by this decision, which meant no less than discarding all the work completed so far! Enraged by the decision, they demanded that a new project manager be appointed, and threatened to stop working altogether if Mikami was not replaced, and replaced quickly. As for Mikami, he would use all of his wiles to persuade some of his most loyal staff to trust him. Armed with some support for going back to the drawing board, Mikami successfully began developing a new version of the game. This time, however, the idea was to create pre-rendered 3D backgrounds for real-time 3D characters to inhabit (this was Capcom’s first experiment with the technique). Using pre-rendered 3D (a brilliant idea whose origins we now know) meant that high quality textures could be used and–more importantly–used in high quantities. The result would be exploited using fixed camera angles for carefully considered, extremely cinematic viewing angles that could be used to stoke a sense of anxiety within the players, as we will see later in chapter 7.

Nevertheless, Mikami’s perfectionism would rear its head yet again, and his extremely demanding nature wanted more than the PlayStation could give, despite the fact that the console was chosen for the power it provided and its supposed ability to deliver the desired gaming experience. What really got under Mikami’s skin, making him irritable, were the loading times when moving between rooms. Despite the technology used for the game’s backgrounds, made up of fixed images, there was nothing that could be done: the loading times remained stubbornly long. It was then that Mikami remembered the initial inspiration for the game, Sweet Home: to go easier on the player’s patience while simultaneously helping to build pressure, there was a little cut-scene every time a door was opened. Mikami decided to use the same strategy, and the cut-scene was used to mask the loading time. But that is not all the new title would take from its 1987 role model: in the first few months of its development, Mikami also wanted to include a co-op system. Imitating the one used in Sweet Home, the hero in Resident Evil was going to be accompanied by an AI controlled character at all times. This idea was, however, soon dropped.