Yasuhiro Ampo

The Racoon City Police Station is perhaps the most iconic location in Resident Evil, whose large marble entrance and tight hallways made 1998’s RE2 simultaneously beautiful and haunting, personal and claustrophobic. This created an oppressive tone that multiplied as supplies dwindled and made fighting the undead horde and mutated freaks inside that much more terrifying. But after that, Resident Evil’s survival horror gradually broke from the slow burn atmospheric terror into the tense action era, which reworked the resource management into revolutionary fast-paced third person shoot outs. But the genes that made Capcom’s viral horror design continued to mutate over the next two decades, until it was time to return to Racoon City and merge the eras, bringing atmosphere, consequence, and vulnerability to the tuned gameplay. The 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake is both the reimagining of an amazing genre classic and the sequel to a legendary remake.

By Resident Evil 5, the series has morphed from a slow burn horror game that emulated a B zombie film into a bombastic action horror co-op spectacular, using a selectable mission-based structure that told an episodic story about bioterrorism. The change from classic survival horror began as early as RE2, adding action elements, scope, and minigames that would eventually merge into a responsive, agile gameplay that was more thrilling than terrifying. In little more than a decade, Resident Evil had seen two distinct generations, the first built around an item-based progression and the other refined into a tactical action shooter with complex level design. The quick evolution injected defects that risked killing the series, but the production team was able to administer much needed treatment, first by stripping the design down in Resident Evil: Revelations, then grafting new tissue with Revelations 2.