Resident Evil Creator reveals the inspiration behind the franchise

One of the most important horror video games of all time is Resident EvilThe game was developed by Capcom and directed by Shinji Mikami in 1996. Since its release, it has spawned a franchise of over 100 million units sold and has become one of the cornerstones of the survival horror genre that it helped shape. While Mikami left Capcom after the Clover Studio closed in 2007, he remained vocal about his opinion Resident Evil Series. In the latest video documentary on the Japanese YouTube channel Archipel, Mikami discusses the inspirations behind the original Resident Evil.

While it’s no secret that the original Resident Evil started out as the spiritual successor to the exclusive Japanese horror role-playing game Sweet home For the Famicom (NES), Mikami revealed that Capcom had originally reached out to him about making another mechanic horror game from Sweet home, including a first-person camera and an emphasis on ghosts as the game’s enemies. Mikami claims so after seeing George A. Romeros Dawn of the Dead He was inspired to focus the game on zombies instead.

The inclusion of zombies as the main enemy type has also been made Resident Evil more accessible to non-horror fans like Mikami thought having Sweet home as a basis it led to the development of concepts that worked well for “core horror fans” but were unsuccessful in terms of sales. The next inspiration for Shinji Mikami is Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film The Texas chainsaw massacre. Mikami refers to a scene in which the villain Leatherface kills a character and drags them across the floor, which inspired Resident Evil’s introduction of the Hunter Enemy.

When discussing the original version’s ego camera, Mikami claims he designed it Resident Evil showing a first-person perspective until he saw Infogrames’ 1992 DOS horror game Alone in the darkwhich inspired him to use pre-rendered backgrounds for the game environments. Chasing a first-person camera could have set Resident Evil There is a risk of over budget as the team had no previous experience with 3D game design at the time. As Mikami discusses the decision to use fixed camera angles, “At the end of the day, a lot of players told me that they thought that this would make the game more terrifying. I say it was just a workaround. ”

The creation of Resident Evil is just one of the many things that were discussed in the first part of Archipel’s documentary about Shinji Mikami. In the video, the legendary game director discusses his work among other things Dino-Crisis and other Resident Evil Titles that reveal that Resident Evil 3 was originally intended as a spin-off targeting core fans of the franchise before Capcom forced the team to expand its appeal and restructure it as a numbered entry. He also discusses how Resident Evil – Code: Veronica should be a numbered entry on the series before Capcom and Sega disagreed on Dreamcast’s exclusivity.

Mikami also briefly discusses his roles as a director and producer of titles, as well as his disappointment with the Resident Evil Games made after his time at Capcom but claims to have been a fan of Resident Evil 7: Biogefährdungas well as the state of the horror genre in both video games and throughout film. Shinji Mikami is currently Executive Producer at Tango GameWorks for titles like Evil in 2 and Ghostwire: Tokyo.

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