Every October, without fail, I recommit to watching and playing as many horror movies and games as I can possibly fit. For one reason or another, however, I always drop off about halfway through the month with just a handful of accomplishments to actually show for my effort, and I’m sure this year will be no different. I’m sure I’m not the only one who tries and fails in this regard. This year, rather than aiming to play a bunch of contemporary games, I’m going to try and fill in some gaps, and I think I’m going to start with the original Resident Evil trilogy.
Now, Capcom has remade damn near half of the mainline Resident Evil games at this point, including the first four numbered installments, and I’ve played quite a few of them! But I’ve never really played the OGs outside of a brief experience with an emulation of Resident Evil 2 on the PS3, and I think it’s about time I buckled down and finally took the dip. Luckily, in a move that I’m sure has thrilled video game preservationists, Capcom has released the original versions of the first three Resident Evil games on GOG, and they’re now bundled together.
The Resident Evil Bundle which packages the first three titles is going for just $25 on GOG. Considering the legacy of these three games, as well as the larger series, that’s a damn steal for the origins of the franchise credited with defining and popularizing the survival horror genre.
The first Resident Evil is perhaps the single most influential horror game ever. A whole franchise would spill out from it, but it has also been the impetus for several other horror games and series that would seek out its throne and challenge it, including The Evil Within, which shares the same creator, Shinji Mikami. It is also one of the early 3D games that helped define the bounds of the technology, filling screens with immaculate pre-rendered backgrounds and leveraging the capabilities of the PS1 to lend the game a cinematic quality complete with fixed camera angles, which I desperately miss in games these days.
Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion is one of the most recognizable settings in video games, but the series would one-up itself in the subsequent follow-ups, Resident Evil 2 and 3: Nemesis. Raccoon City, and in particular its police station, have been etched into the brains of video game horror savants for decades now. The labyrinthine nature of the latter, as well as the tunnels and labs underneath it, still inspire callbacks within the very same series to this day, and the city figures prominently into the history of the games, as well as the media franchise that spawned from it.
Each of these three games has also given us some of gaming’s most iconic heroes and fearsome enemies. Chris and Clarie Redfield, Leon Kennedy, and Jill Valentine are still hugely popular characters today, and Chris is still a driving force of the series’ ongoing story as of the end of Resident Evil Village, even if he does change faces every time he shows up. Some of these characters are even referenced in the recent hit Astro Bot, which comes as little surprise given the huge role that Resident Evil has played in PlayStation’s history. On the other side of things, folks still utterly hate (but secretly love) foes like the gruesome Lickers and Mr. X himself, and have cheered on the return of these enemies in the critically lauded remakes.
These games have history, but not all of it’s exactly great. These three games are kind of old (the oldest one of them predates my time on Earth) and I’m sure that age will show. The classic Resident Evil games are known for their stiff “tank controls” after all, and I’m sure that they’re largely more difficult than the modern entries on their most normal difficulty. However, that isn’t stopping me from giving them a shot, nor should it stop you!
It’s rare that we have access to the original article like this. Most older games just kind of go missing at some point, and even the legendary ones often get locked away to be remade for even more gains down the line. In that sense, consider me grateful that the first three Resident Evil games are just sitting on a store page for a bafflingly affordable price. Now, let’s all get reacquainted with survival horror’s tremendous roots in honor of the spooky season.