Anniversaries are important in the video game industry because they can show you how far something has come or how long something has gone without something happening. For the Resident Evil franchise, we’ll focus on the former. One of the definitive horror franchises in the video game space, Capcom has been making these titles since the first one arrived on PlayStation over 27 years ago. Since then, they have had many ups and downs, and at one point, fans feared that the franchise would soon die out. But they rebounded strongly, making this anniversary worth celebrating in many ways.
You must remember that making a horror game was anything but easy in the early generations of video game systems. They didn’t have the graphics or the processing power to make things work. That’s why when Resident Evil came out, it inspired so much of what came after. Certain moments stand out as scary even to this day. An easy one to mention is when you’re walking down a hallway, and a mutated dog bursts through a window and races right at you. That was the kind of thing video games hadn’t done in the past.
After learning their craft, they would make multiple successful mainline and spinoff titles. The second and third games stand out for either their main characters, like Leon S. Kennedy, or their villains, like Nemesis.
Then, the fourth entry brought back Leon and helped change the franchise forever by warping it slightly to a more action-style feel than what they had before.
Ironically, it was after that title that things started to go off the rails. The next two entries in the franchise, alongside some spinoffs, were stated to be some of the series’ worst games. They needed to refocus on what their franchise was.
That’s where the 7th entry came into play. The game went from a first-person perspective and focused mainly on horror, and it worked. The 7th mainline entry is the best-selling game in the line and for a good reason. But Capcom could do nearly as well with the game that followed, likely because of a certain 9-foot-tall vampire lady that people still can’t stop talking about.
Add that to the remakes that have come out or will soon arrive, and you can see why Resident Evil still endures. It may not have been the smoothest ride, but Capcom made it work, and we all know that another title is in the works due to recent successes.
