A helicopter crew goes missing in the woods outside Raccoon City. The rest of the STARS special unit, sent to find it, is chased by wild dogs into an old mansion. Resident Evil, Capcom’s PlayStation game of 1996, is the story of what the survivors find inside: zombies, traps and puzzles, and a research laboratory where a pharmaceutical company has been breeding monsters. It was the first game sold as “survival horror”, and the name stuck to a whole genre.
It came close to not appearing at all. Its director, Shinji Mikami, was making his debut with a team that had never made anything like it, a consultant’s report advised Capcom to cancel it, and when it reached the West under a new name, its English dialogue was mocked for years. It sold, in Mikami’s words, “more than twice the number of copies we were anticipating”.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Capcom.
- Director: Shinji Mikami. Producer: Tokuro Fujiwara.
- Japanese title: Biohazard.
- Released: PlayStation, Japan, 22 March 1996; United States, spring 1996; Britain, summer 1996. Sega Saturn, July 1997. Windows PC, December 1996 in Japan and 1997 in the West.
- Price in Japan: ¥5,800.
- Sales: 2.75 million on the PlayStation, plus 2.33 million for the two Director’s Cut editions.
- Series total: 213 million games by June 2026.
From Sweet Home to Biohazard
The idea came from above. “Biohazard’s starting point came when my boss at the time — Fujiwara-san [Tokuro Fujiwara, Capcom’s general manager] — told me to make a horror title using the game system of Sweet Home,” Mikami told Retro Gamer. Sweet Home was Fujiwara’s own Famicom game of 1989, a role-playing game of a Japanese horror film, set in a haunted mansion. Capcom said as much before the new game came out. “Way back in the NES days we developed an RPG called Sweet Home and it’s from there where our inspiration comes,” Capcom’s Akio Sakai told Edge in March 1996. “Sweet Home was an adventure set in an old mansion like Resident Evil’s.” Sakai added that Capcom was aiming the game “at 18 year-olds in Japan, a higher age than Capcom usually aims at”, partly because the PlayStation was “supported by older people”.
Mikami started planning in January 1994. His first thought was a game full of ghosts, the thing he had always been most scared of, but he decided there would be no “real feeling of exhilaration” in shooting at them. The enemies needed to be close to human in form. “Yes, I thought — zombies! At that time I recalled the film, Dawn Of The Dead. I loved that film.” He wanted the player to do what the characters in the film could not: survive.
Whether Mikami liked being frightened is less clear than the story makes it sound. Wireframe reported Fujiwara’s claim that Mikami hated horror films and had to be coaxed into the job, on the reasoning that someone who felt fear so acutely would make a scarier game; a second Wireframe profile described him as unenthusiastic and quoted him saying he did not even like being scared by entertainment.
For its first six months, Mikami said, “I was the ‘team’”. A second planner joined and left. From the ninth month the team grew to 15, and by the end more than 50 people were working on it, among them Hideki Kamiya, Hiroki Kato and Kazunori Kadoi on the design, Jun Takeuchi on character animation and Yasuhiro Anpo on programming. Mikami said most of them were new to Capcom and the work took “an awful lot of trial-and-error”. In the last six months “the team were mostly living at work”.
Nearly cancelled
The game was planned for both the PlayStation and the Saturn at first. After about a year Capcom dropped the Saturn version because there were not enough staff to build two, and it arrived on the Saturn only in July 1997. The early design was fully 3D, with an over-the-shoulder camera, but the PlayStation of 1995 could not draw it well enough, so the team switched to pre-rendered backgrounds. “The graphics became exceptionally good,” Mikami said, “though operability was sacrificed to achieve that.”
Then a report from Capcom’s consulting company recommended: “Discontinue Biohazard project.” “I went mad!” Mikami said. The project survived, and he learned only about ten years later that it was Fujiwara who had asked Capcom to let it continue.
Inside the mansion
The player chooses Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine of STARS, and the two stories differ. Computer & Video Games explained that Chris was the stronger of the two and Jill could carry more. Barry Burton turns up to help Jill and Rebecca Chambers to help Chris, while their captain, Albert Wesker, is not what he seems. The team learns that the mansion is a research centre of the Umbrella pharmaceutical company, and that its chemicals have changed every living thing around it: zombies, dogs, ravens, giant spiders, snakes and even a shark. At the end waits the Tyrant, a genetically engineered “biological killing machine”.
Edge gave it nine out of ten in June 1996 and called it “Alone in the Dark directed by George A Romero with the design sensibilities of Myst”. The characters were “fully texture-mapped, light-sourced polygons operating in realtime within lavish prerendered backgrounds”, and even “the wallpaper and carpets warrant admiring scrutiny”. The magazine picked out what made it frightening:
- Too few bullets. Half the puzzles rewarded the player with ammunition, and nothing in other games compared with “the panic and despair that you feel as you hammer shot after shot into an advancing zombie … only to hear the dull click of an empty service revolver magazine.”
- Limited space. The inventory held only a few items, and storage trunks held the rest. Saving the game took an ink ribbon at a typewriter.
- The camera. “Everything in Resident Evil is geared towards suspense: the skewed camera angles, the haunting strains of the soundtrack, the fact that you can run forwards but only retreat in painfully slow steps.” The control scheme has its own entry: tank controls.
Mikami placed the cameras to hide things on purpose. “Even if you knew before looking round a corner that a zombie was going to be there, we set up blind spots so that players wouldn’t be able to see the zombies [immediately],” he said. Retro Gamer singled out the door sequences between rooms, a door opening onto black with the sampled sound of a turning handle, as “extremely effective in boosting both the player’s fear and anticipation levels”. Computer & Video Games was just as impressed: “Compared to this, Hell Raiser is like a Muppet movie.”
Film, script and a new name
The game opened with a short live-action film of the STARS team in the woods; the sequel dropped live action for other video sequences. The English script and voice acting were less admired. Edge’s review said the acting in the cut-scenes would “make the cast of Hollyoaks blush”, and in January 1998 the magazine was still quoting “such classics as ‘You were almost a Jill sandwich!’ and ‘It was all I could do to… stay alive.’” Mikami later said he had once planned for the game to switch into deliberate comedy partway through, and dropped the idea for lack of time. Retro Gamer drew the distinction: he meant planned humour, not the accidental kind in the English translation.
In Japan the game was Biohazard. Capcom’s American office changed the name. Chris Kramer, its director of communications, recalled in 2009 that in late 1994 he warned the head of marketing that “it would be next to impossible for Capcom to register the name in the US”, because a DOS game called Biohazard had just come out and a New York hardcore band had the same name. The head of marketing “held a company-wide contest to come up with a new name”. The winner, Resident Evil, was “a clever pun – the first game was set in a mansion”. Kramer voted against it as “super-cheesy”. Mikami, who had no say in the choice, told Retro Gamer that he thought the Western title “stupid” and still called the game Biohazard.
Sales and new versions
Capcom lists 2.75 million copies of the original PlayStation release. Resident Evil: Director’s Cut (September 1997), which added changes and came with a playable demo of the sequel, sold 1.13 million, and a Dual Shock edition for Sony’s vibrating controller (August 1998) 1.20 million. The Saturn version added a second Tyrant and a battle mode. The Windows version of 1997, PC Gamer reported, “laughs (evilly) at its PlayStation counterpart, producing higher resolution screens and considerably more zombies” on a PowerVR graphics card.
Capcom remade the game for Nintendo’s GameCube in 2002. Its sales list also credits a November 2014 release of Resident Evil for the PlayStation 3 and download with 5.7 million copies, more than twice the original’s.
The series
Mikami became producer for Resident Evil 2 (January 1998), which Hideki Kamiya directed. It sold 4.96 million copies on the PlayStation, and Capcom employed George A. Romero to direct a Japanese television advert for it, which cost ¥150 million and took two days to film. Resident Evil 3 Nemesis followed in 1999 and Code: Veronica on the Dreamcast in 2000. A German company, Constantin, bought the film rights; the first Resident Evil film came out in 2002, and Capcom reported worldwide takings of $102 million.
Resident Evil 4 (2005) moved the camera over the hero’s shoulder and turned the series towards action, and Resident Evil 5 (2009) and 6 (2012) followed. Resident Evil 7 biohazard (January 2017) switched to a first-person view. It was the first game on Capcom’s RE Engine, which Capcom then used to remake its old games. By June 2026 the Resident Evil 2 remake of 2019 had sold 19.7 million copies, the most of any game in the series; Resident Evil 7 had sold 18.4 million, Village (2021) 15.8 million, the Resident Evil 4 remake (2023) 16 million, and Resident Evil Requiem, released in February 2026, 8 million. Capcom counted the whole series at 213 million.
Sources
- Jonti Davies, “The Making of Resident Evil”, Retro Gamer, reprinted in Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010, pp. 118–123: interview with Shinji Mikami (Fujiwara and Sweet Home, planning from January 1994, ghosts and zombies, Dawn of the Dead, team size and staff, the Saturn version and its July 1997 release, pre-rendering, the over-the-shoulder camera, the consultant’s report and Fujiwara’s intervention, blind spots and doors, the planned comedy, the Western title, “more than twice” the expected sales, the sequel’s director and producer).
- Edge issue 30, March 1996, p. 51: interview with Akio Sakai, head of Capcom’s consumer software division (Sweet Home, the target age).
- Edge issue 33, June 1996: Resident Evil review, nine out of ten (price, release, the Alone in the Dark comparison, the graphics, ammunition, trunks, the camera and slow retreat, the acting). The score is legible in the reprint in Edge‘s 2001 special collectors’ edition.
- Computer & Video Games issue 173, April 1996, p. 26: preview (Chris and Jill, Barry, Rebecca). Issue 176, July 1996: review (the helicopter, the dogs, Umbrella, the monsters, ink ribbons, “Hell Raiser”).
- Wireframe issue 7, February 2019, pp. 50–53, profile of Tokuro Fujiwara, and issue 20, August 2019, pp. 50–51, profile of Shinji Mikami: Fujiwara as co-producer, Sweet Home, Mikami’s reluctance. Wireframe issue 67, October 2022, p. 39: Resident Evil 7’s switch to first person.
- Wikipedia, “Resident Evil (1996 video game)” (web, secondary): Fujiwara as producer; the Japanese release on 22 March 1996; the Windows release dates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_(1996_video_game)
- Edge issue 237, February 2012: typewriter saves.
- Sega Saturn Magazine issue 22, August 1997, p. 49, and issue 23, September 1997, p. 49: the Saturn version (the Tyrant, the second Tyrant, the battle mode, “treacherous Captain Wesker”).
- Hyper issue 55, May 1998, p. 49: Resident Evil 2 review (“The live action scenes of the original are no longer”).
- Edge issue 54, January 1998: Romero’s advert for Resident Evil 2, the film rights, and the dialogue.
- Brett Elston, “GR Asks: Why was Biohazard renamed Resident Evil?”, GamesRadar, 8 April 2009 (web, secondary), answered by Chris Kramer. https://www.gamesradar.com/gr-asks-why-was-biohazard-renamed-resident-evil/
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 47, September 1997, and PC Player (Germany), September 1997: the PowerVR Windows version, and its move to ordinary PCs.
- Capcom, “Corporate History”, “Platinum Titles” and “Game Series Sales”, figures as of 30 June 2026 (web, secondary): release months and sales of the PlayStation, Director’s Cut, Dual Shock, GameCube and later versions, Resident Evil 2, 3, Code: Veronica, 4, 5, 6, 7, Village, the remakes and Requiem; the 2002 film’s takings; the series total. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/company/history.html, https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/million.html and https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/salesdata.html