My first intimate encounter with zombies will always be the Resident Evil series of games. For me, it's the best way to experience zombie-horror. I was 8 or 9 and hadn't seen Night of the Living Dead, wasn't aware of Peter Jackson's Brain Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Dead 3 (ummm yeah...), Zombi, and 28 Days Later hadn't been made yet. My first memory of Resident Evil was back in the late 90s. I went over to my cousin's house and he had just gotten Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. I remember him starting it up and it saying something to the effect of: "this game has tons of violence and gore." I--being a TV-raised 9 year old model American--couldn't have been more excited. I remember rewinding the scene where Luke Skywalker slices off the Wampa's arm in Empire Strikes Back over and over again... Blood, violence, gore. Yes.
But my first experience with RE wasn't a good one. I wasn't ready. The lumbering zombies were eerie, ever present, and evil. They tore at my flesh, caught me from behind, and sometimes even surprised me by gnawed at my legs. My pistol constantly ran out of ammo, recovery items were far and in between, and that wasn't even the beginning of my nightmare.
The first time I was chased by Nemesis I had to quit the game and play something else. He was just too menacing. The behemoth took bullet after bullet. Stalking me around the front of the police station until I either died or manage to get inside. He had one creepy whited-out eye and a big skin graft sewn over the other one and was a good 3 feet taller than poor Jill Valentine. It was incredible. "Am I even supposed to beat this thing?" I asked myself. I had to let my cousin keep playing because I just didn't have the courage.
But even though it had scared the pants off of me two years or so prior, I bought a copy of Resident Evil 2 (I couldn't find RE1). I was a that much older and that much braver.
I'll never forget the first time your character walks into the police station and goes into that first room with the Item Box. There's an unsettling silence. And right when you go around the corner to go up the staircase, you see some creature scurry across the window briefly. Immediately, I went into fight/flight mode: pulse quickened, muscles tensed... That's the first time you encounter the Licker: by far my favorite Resident Evil B.O.W. (Bio-Organic Weapon). Odds are, I don't have to explain to you what he looks like: it's an image burned into our collective gamer-consciousness.
Resident Evil holds a lot of memories for me. I remember getting used to the "tank" controls, learning how to manage items, Umbrella, ink ribbons and typewriters (and the annoying trek back to the item box because you forgot the take the said ribbons out of your inventory before leaving the safe room...), the T-Virus, the simple one-word names for all your enemies: Tyrant, Licker, Hunter, etc., the red zombie, S.T.A.R.S., all the opening doors and going up staircases/ladders screens, the zombies, the bio-weapons, the ridiculous dialogue in RE1 (MASTER OF UNLOCKING!), the player characters (Jill, Chris, Claire, Leon, Ada, HUNK, Rebecca, Billy, Sheva, and of course... Tofu), the mansion, Raccoon city, the "the B1 key is useless now. Discard?" prompts. And of course that feeling of sheer dread and terror that always finds you when you're up at 2AM wandering through Raccoon City.
I hold the old games so dear that whenever I read a file on a computer in RE5 that vaguely referred to the Licker my heart literally jumped out of my chest. It did so again when I actually encountered one. Even through I played the original three games in reverse, I went back and played each one in sequence. I can't count how many times I've cleared them.
The original, arguably, created the entire genre of survival horror. It was a revolutionary concept. Years later, Resident Evil 4 would mimic its progenitor and turn the gaming world on its head again. Your enemies this time were parasites that turned the peaceful Spanish locals into deadly, pitchfork wielding zombies under the control of Lord Saddler. 4 had a high focus on action and shooting. It introduced an over-the-shoulder perspective and manual aim so you could shoot enemies wherever you wanted. No longer were spectacular gory headshots only restricted to the magnum! Other additions include a QTE system (quick time events) that allowed you to melee stunned enemies and dodge. You couldn't put the controller down during cut scenes because often you would have to input commands to continue (i.e. survive) the game. However, half the fun was watching Leon die: impaled by wooden stake after falling down into pit, eaten by a giant, mutated mud-puppy, ripped in half by a boss, decapitated by a chainsaw wielding zombie. Delicious violence. However, a lot of RE hallmarks were abandoned. Ink ribbons were done away with; a change that I'm sure didn't upset a lot of people. The traditional lumbering zombies were gone; replaced by the smarter, agile, and weapon-wielding Ganados. Albert Wesker and Umbrella were conspicuously absent from center stage. The game relied on the ol' "The Presidents daughter has been kidnaped. Rescue her" plot. By far the single biggest change was the gameplay. RE4 played out as more of an action-adventure game than a horror game with Leon blasting through hordes of zombies, running from boulders and giant statues, and leaping out of mine cart moments before it plunges off a cliff. Even with all these improvements and changes, 4 still had the Resident Evil atmosphere: you still faced mutated abominations in combat and inventory management was still key. It was an incredible leap forward. Resident Evil had evolved into a new kind of hideous beast. These changes were universally welcomed, but I get the feeling that I wasn't the only one that was a bit disappointed. Resident Evil 5 took us to where it all started: Africa. Our dream of cooperative play was also made reality. A new player character was introduced, Sheva Alomar. Wesker and Umbrella was back and many of the series secrets and questions were answered. It retained the same shooting mechanics and an improved QTE system that allowed a larger variety of melee attacks. It also continued the action-adventure style of 4. For me, it was a dream come true.
However, the series is not wholly without dark moments. Much like the mutated William Birkin, games like Gun Survivor popped up every now and then to assault the high standards we held the RE series to. These games aren't so much poorly made as just experiments gone wrong. Perhaps Capcom thought that by releasing these abominations, they were--in a kind of post-modern/existential way--creating literal monsters to hunt us down and destroy us. I don't think its too big of a stretch to say that they were.
Curiously, RE is called Biohazard in Japan. Biohazard is the original name of the series. What does Resident Evil even mean? Was it a translation error? like: "Residence of Evil"? The first game takes place entirely in a mansion on the outskirts of Raccoon City so that's a maybe. Perhaps its referring to the zombies and B.O.W's: Resident referring to their status as tenets in this mansion; and Evil because they want to eat your flesh. The game's creator, Shinji Mikami, created another horror franchise: Dino Crisis. Was that games name changed in America too? I don't know. Dino Crisis is similar to Biohazard because a "hazard" and a "crisis" are both conditions while "bio" and "dino" are both modifiers to these conditions. Resident Evil can be interpreted the same way (like I said above: evil residents) but it isn't as clear as Biohazard. That's like calling Dino Crisis "Jungle Evil".
In closing, thank you Shinji Mikami and Capcom for bring Resident Evil to the world. Thank you for scaring the hell out of me over and over again.
