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A General History 1993 - 1997Alone in the DarkThe 7th GuestGabriel Knight: Sins of the FathersPhantasmagoriaResident Evil and the Survival Horror BoomRealms of the HauntingBlood


Resident Evil and the Survival-Horror Boom
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
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As already noted, the most important legacy of Alone in the Dark can be found on the Sony PlayStation. Japanese console game developer and publisher Capcom adopted most of the mood and mannerisms of the Infogrames game into Resident Evil, a work that took the entertainment industry by storm in 1996. Millions of copies of the original game, as well as its Director's Cut (featuring more blood and guts), were sold. The evolving series helped Sony take over the console market by the close of 1996, with many people buying the PlayStation system just to play those games.

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Gore is a big part of Resident Evil's appeal.

Anyone familiar with Alone in the Dark would have immediately recognized the design of Resident Evil and its sequels. You always play a lone man or woman stranded in a particular area of Raccoon City at the mercy of zombies created by the corrupt Umbrella Corporation. Your goal is to slaughter monsters, solve simple puzzles, and foil the machinations of Umbrella...although the latter never seems to work very well, since it is soon up to more hideous misdeeds in the sequels. All action was portrayed with a third-person camera set up at eccentric angles to accentuate the suspenseful potential of each particular scene. The payoff was usually something like a zombie smashing through a broken window. These cheap thrills usually worked, contributing to a thrill-ride atmosphere.

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Dino Crisis was also ported to the PC.

One major difference between the Resident Evil games and their sister series, Dino Crisis, is that you are never really "alone in the dark." Where Edward Carnby is a simple private investigator in over his head, much of the time in these games, you are either working as part of a team or looking for someone who can assist you. Also, the heroes and heroines are romantically named (Valentine, Redfield, Kennedy, and so on) members of a paramilitary police unit called STARS. Gunning down zombies never seems like that big of a deal, since your whole life is about taking on bad guys with high-powered weaponry.

Despite these issues, Resident Evil soon found its way to the PC. Each of the three primary games--Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis--was ported to computers about a year after they made their PlayStation debuts. These efforts were never successful with either critics or consumers, though they certainly helped stimulate the production of horror games across all gaming platforms (as will be shown in the second part of this feature). They also managed to influence horror game design in that they further proved the viability of the Alone in the Dark model. The fact that this was occurring at the same time that Infogrames was doing all it could to discredit that good name by releasing two poor sequels made Capcom's efforts even more important.

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It isn't a game for arachnophobes...

But perhaps the most important trend introduced by Resident Evil was that gamers would accept, and even flock to, cross-genre efforts. Blending elements of action and adventure had never been so captivating. Most such concepts were miserable failures, in fact, so you can't blame publishers for coming to the conclusion that the average gamer was confused by those games. That's still the case today, given the predominance of various cookie-cutter designs, though there is more cross-genre design than ever before.


 

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