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Resident Evil’s Unlikely Success

Why did Resident Evil work? It’s not an unfair question. While many agree that it was Resident Evil 2 that turned the franchise into the powerhouse that it is today it required the success of the first game in order to happen- a game that has been released several different times and remastered. Twice!

By all accounts the first Resident Evil had terrible voice acting, a dodgy story, and one of my top five worst control schemes of all time, tank controls. And with all that going against it, the game turned out to be a hit. Why?

Today on Arcadology, we are going to dive into the creation and subsequent success of Resident Evil.

Before Resident Evil

The horror genre was underutilized in the early days of the game industry. Before the crash of 1983, there were only a few games that could be reasonably considered horror like 3D Monster Maze. In the decade that followed, most of which was during a boom in the slasher genre, there were more efforts to design horror games, and some of these games were both successful and memorable to this day: including Splatterhouse, Alone in the Dark, System Shock, and more.

But there wasn’t a moment in which the industry collectively decided to push toward developing horror, not yet. In the late 70s, Space Invaders prompted many companies to ride the “defending the earth against alien invasion” wave. Pac Man created a fascination with “maze chases.” Super Mario Brothers pushed everyone in the direction of side scrolling platformers.

Horror’s gaming moment arrived in the form of Resident Evil. Called Bio Hazard in Japan and released 1996, Resident Evil sparked a golden age of horror in game development that lasted through the early 2000s. The game’s origin though dates seven years prior, with another game titled Sweet Home.

Resident Evil’s Inspirations

Sweet Home is something that was out of place when it was released, in a good way. The game is a top-down 8-bit RPG that graphically would look familiar to fans of old school Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games. Unlike those games though, it was a horror title, based on a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film of the same name. Capcom and game designer, Tokuro Fujiwara were brought on by the studio to make a game adaptation that would have a day and date release with the film. Prior to this, Fujiwara had worked mostly on arcade classics like Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Commando, and possibly my favorite platformer of all time, Bionic Commando.

The game, loosely based off the film, takes place in a mansion where a documentary crew has been trapped by a spirit while attempting to preserve the fresco’s of a dead artist.

Some of the choices Fujiwara made for the game were a bit experimental. Unshackled from the need to follow the plot of the film exactly, as well as not needing to consider an arcade version of the game, Fujiwara developed game mechanics that were rather ahead of their time. These included being able to split the party up, dropping and picking up items, and permadeath. Also, check out this door transition. Look familiar?

Fujiwara’s success with Sweet Home would land him with a promotion up to Producer, which from what I can gather, meant that his days with direct, hands on development of games were over. Fujiwara though would carry the experience of developing Sweet Home and horror with him.

A few years later, on the verge of a new generation of consoles, a Capcom executive sent out a memo recommending that the company begin investigating the development of a horror game using 3D technology. Fujiwara, who had been wanting to get back into horror since his experience with Sweet Home decided to assign the project to his protoge, Shinji Mikami.

Mikami up until that point had been working exclusively on Capcom’s Disney license, his best seller being the SNES version of Aladdin, which let’s be honest, is a pretty tight game. According to Fujiwara, Mikami at the time was terrified of the horror genre, which meant that he was perfect for the role.

Mikami was unsure about the game- he didn’t know if mainstream horror game would sell and all evidence up until that point made it seem like a dicey proposition. Whether the game was ever intended to be a remake of Sweet Home or not is anecdotal information at best. What we do know though was that Sweet Home and another horror game, Alone in the Dark served as inspiration points for several of the design choices made.

So what were those influences? For Sweet Home first and foremost would be the conceit of the story, a group of people are somehow trapped in a spooky mansion, only instead of a documentary crew they were police officers. Additionally, concepts like strict inventory management originated in Sweet Home and found their way, in a way into Resident Evil. Additionally, Sweet Home placed an emphasis on puzzle solving, something that was quite prevalent in the gameplay of Resident Evil. In fact it is probably this element that is most inspired by Sweet Home.

And, as I mentioned, the door transitions.

What parts were inspired by Alone in the Dark? The camera angles, which, are honestly a bigger part of the design of the game than anything taken from Sweet Home. When Resident Evil was in early stages, the idea was to develop it from the first person point of view and build the game entirely out of polygons.

Technical limitations though prevented that idea from coming to fruition. After playing Alone in the Dark, Mikami and team understood the effectiveness of using a fixed camera angle with pre-rendered backgrounds. While he was certain immersion and therefore horror would be lessened by the switch, they did it anyway for the sake of creating higher resolution and more detailed environments.

This is a complete side note however, but Resident Evil 7 was widely considered a return to form for the franchise while ditching the third person camera angle in favor of the first person camera angle that the series was intended to have at the very beginning. Another fun nod to the early days of Resident Evil is the documentary crew, which could be seen as a reference to sweet home. But I digress.

Character and story shifted through development as well. Zombies were decided on as the ubiquitous enemy by either Fujiwara, or Mikami. Literally, both have claimed to be the progenitor of that idea in different sources. Eventually, after a prolonged development process, well, prolonged for the time period, Resident Evil would be released in 1996.

The Release of Resident Evil

Reviews for Resident Evil were great, many reviewers echoing that the game was one that could be a game changer for the industry. But even the reviewers with the most effusive praise still could not overlook the voice acting. In 1996, voice work was uncommon in video games, bit even then it was just downright awful. The dialog itself was poorly written, but it was the combination poorly written, and poorly spoken that made Resident Evil’s voice acting the height of hilarity. Historically, it was the voice talent that has been blamed for this. Is that fair?

Well, according to DC Douglas, the current voice of Albert Wesker, no, its not. On a voice acting panel in 2014, Douglas, unprompted defended the work of Sergio Jones, the original Albert Wesker stating that in the early days of game voice over work, actors were often brought into a booth with all their lines printed on a spreadsheet with no context given as to when these lines were actually being spoken. The director would then have the actors read each line with a different emphasis on each word and then files would be sent to the audio engineer in Japan who would pick and choose dialog based on what sounded best to his ear, not to what sounded best to the ear of a non English speaker. Special thanks to Josh Wirtanen from Retrovolve.com for this scoop.

Another common criticism of the game were the controls. Similar to those used in Alone in the Dark, tank controls were a necessary evil because of the fixed camera angle. In traditional free floating third person camera angle games, the directional controls are relative to the camera. When the camera angle is fixed the way it was in these two games, the orientation of the camera relative to the character had the possibility of switching between rooms, therefore left from one camera angle, would not be left in another. Make sense?

Tank controls solved this problem. On the d-pad, up was forward, down was backward, and right and left rotated the character clockwise or counter-clockwise respectively. The downside of these controls were that it made moving your character in any sort of evasive manner extremely difficult, because you couldn’t change direction, and move at the same time. Perhaps this added to the tension, but for me it was often an immersion busting frustration.

Strangely something that I saw repeated several times across reviews in different major publications of the time was praise for the story of the game. Maybe I’m pretty far off base, but the plot is intriguing in that it exists – but if you placed it directly into a movie you’d be accused of writing derivative pulpfiction, but without the self awareness that modern pulp stories bring to the table. That being said, did the plot factor into the game’s success? Well, let’s explore some possible reasons.

Why did Resident Evil Succeed?

First, the rental gambit. Did you know there was a difference in the difficulty between the Japanese and US versions of the game? Most of the time that means the game was harder in Japan and easier in the United States, but in this case it was the reverse. In the mid 90s, rental store chains were a big deal in the states and many of them carried all the latest video games. Capcom of America wanted the game to be more difficult so that it was less likely for the game to be completed on a rental. Now it would be tough to determine whether this had any impact without some raw data that I have a feeling blockbuster is no longer able to provide.

Still that’s one possibility. Let’s talk about the marketing. From what I can find, the game had a commercial that aired, but only in the Japanese market. The earliest commercial I was able to find for Resident Evil 1 in the United States market was this Christmas commercial for the director’s cut and Resident Evil 2. Obviously TV time is only one part of the equation. Many gamer’s in the mid 90s were subscribed to one of several gaming magazines, the most popular being EGM, GamePro, Game Informer, and the like. My thinking was that surely there had to have been a blitz in the magazines, right? Well, yes and no – prior to the game’s release, there were not many paid ads to be found in these magazines, it was only after March when these spots started appearing. There were two varieties, one featuring this iconic art from the game, and the other that basically gets the plot of the game wrong.

An interesting aside was that there were plenty of ads to be found for another horror game called “D” which at the time was soon to be released for the Playstation. It had already been released a year prior for the doomed 3DO.

While there weren’t a ton of ads to be found, there were plenty of preview articles, which sometimes felt like advertisements back in the day. These articles were filled with the gory, pun intended, details of the upcoming game, and for an adolescent horror fan such as myself, I ate it up. Like a zombie. Eating a –never mind.

So how about the plot? Well, despite the plot being, by my subjective measure kinda bad, the fact that it existed and had a tremendous amount of detail was no small feat for the type of game that Resident Evil was. Abundant plot was still something that was more likely to be found in an RPG in the mid 90s. Most games used it simply as an excuse to prop up gameplay. Resident Evil had an attempt at mystery and suspense in the story that unfolds throughout the game, with one decent twist packed in there, it definitely gets an A for effort. How did this factor into the success? This is probably the most anecdotal piece of this video, so take it for a grain of salt, but I recall in the early days of Resident Evil’s release, that there was enough plot to spark a conversation amongst other kids my age. Rumors about Wesker living were born immediately at the lunch table, as well as other elements. The plot, mixed with Easter eggs and hidden items possibly contributed to a strong word of mouth, which was gold to game executives in the 90s. But that, keep in mind is my conjecture.

Finally, lets circle back around to what started me on this discussion. Genre. Perhaps, the executive at Capcom simply read the tea leaves correctly, and identified that finally the market was actually ready for a horror game, and Mikami’s team managed to capitalize by offering gamers something inspired by some of the best horror games of the previous few years, and remixing it into something brand new.

Resident Evil’s Re-Releases

As I mentioned at the top, the original Resident Evil would be re-released several times over the following years. The Director’s Cut promised to restore the gore to the cut scenes, except it didn’t. Capcom blamed it on some sort of localization issue. The Director’s Cut also returned the game to its original difficulty by adding in an auto-aim that was in the original Japanese version that had been stripped away for the American release.

The director’s cut would be released again with dual shock support and possibly the most controversial change, a completely brand new score by composer Mamoru Samuragochi. Samuragochi, known as the Japanese Beethoven because of his deafness created a new score for the game that was widely panned. Just listen to this one track. Yes that made it into the game. The story gets weirder though when it comes out years later, that Samuragochi didn’t even write the music he was credited for, he had been paying a ghost writer. So not only was it bad, it wasn’t even his bad. Such a weird moment.

The horror genre in gaming did go on to see a boom period after Resident Evil’s release. Capcom benefitted with continuing the Resident Evil franchise, as well as starting the Dino Crisis series, which was basically Resident Evil with dinosaurs. Konami threw their hat into the ring with Silent Hill, and Square Enix had Parasite Eve. Clock Tower, a SNES game which predated Resident Evil, was given new blood, pun intended, as a 3D survival horror. In another video though, we will talk about the decline and rebirth of the genre.

For all the fun and quirks of the first Resident Evil, as a relatively early PlayStation game, it ultimately aged rather poorly. It’s interesting to look back on 3D games from the mid-90s and compare them to the pixel art games of the same time. Frequently, pixel based games have aged rather well over the years, and the 3D games, much like the earliest use of CGI in movies, have looked a bit worse for wear. Combined with the shoday voice acting, Resident Evil was ripe for the remaking when it came time to honor a contract Capcom had signed with Nintendo. But the remake, and what it meant for the franchise is another story altogether.

That will do it for this episode! If you like this stuff take a look at this video on the history of Dark Souls! You can find the channel on twitter at Arcadology, or you can follow me for my own personal thoughts @spoilerkevin. Until next time, thanks for watching Arcadology!

Sonic The Hedgehog in the Genesis Era, Part 2

When the second Sonic came out I don’t recall playing Sonic 1 afterwards. Something about the addition of the spindash made Sonic 1 suddenly feel obsolete to me. Personal preferences aside, after Sonic 1, Naka and team truly hit their stride, but it was not necessarily smooth sailing. Welcome back to Origin of the Series, Sonic in the Genesis Era, Part 2.

 

Historical Context

Despite the game’s massive success, Yuji Naka was not happy. Known by some as a bit of a hot head, Naka did not like the fact that Sega of Japan prevented the development team from putting their credits on the game. Hiding developer identities was an old practice of game companies dating back to the days of Atari. In fact, the first Easter egg in a video game was in the Atari game Adventure and was a credit of the game’s programmer, Warren Robinett. The use of this was designed to prevent poaching by other companies. However, for Naka, it was beyond the pale for the company to celebrate such a success without giving credit. He would quit Sega, but his absence wasn’t long.

Recruiting Naka

There are two versions of the story of Naka’s recruitment over to Sega of America. One version, as told by the Blake Harris book Console Wars unfolded like this: Shinobu Toyoda, Tom Kalinske’s right hand at Sega of America, and the acting liaison to the Sega of Japan, immediately traveled to Japan after he discovered Naka’s departure. Kalinske knew that Naka was an important part of the team, and gave Toyoda a lot of leeway in his efforts to re-recruit Naka. After a promise of better pay, recognition, and the ability to choose his team, Naka agreed to work at the Sega Technical Institute, headed by an old colleague, Mark Cerny of Marble Madness fame. Yasuhara, who was supposed to join the Sega Technical Institute a few years prior, joined Naka.
In the other version of the story, it wasn’t Toyoda who convinced Naka to join the Sega Technical institute, but rather Cerny himself, given that the two of them had worked together previously. As always, the truth in these accounts usually tends to fall somewhere in the middle, with Toyoda and Cerny working together to convince Yuji Naka to join.

Game Development: Sonic 2 and Sonic CD

Mark Cerny wanted to get moving on Sonic 2, with his biggest assets on his new team being two of the three creators of Sonic. However, when he pitched this idea to marketing he was told to hold off. In an interview with a fan site, Sega-16, Cerny said, “Bizarrely their response was…’no, it’s much too soon.” While they were waiting they began work on another game, only to have that development interrupted when SOA came back to the Technical Institute, telling them they indeed had to get to work on Sonic 2.
Sonic co-creator Naoto Oshima remained behind at Sega of Japan and in charge of Sonic Team. While the Sega Technical Institute produced Sonic 2, Sonic Team Japan’s responsibility was to create a “revamped” version of Sonic 1 for the Sega CD add-on system.  Sonic 2 would see the addition of the longtime sidekick, “Tails.”

Tails

The development of the two-tailed fox was one of the sore points between the American marketing teams and Japanese developers of Sonic Team. While the character’s design was universally accepted, his name was not. Miles Prower, a pun on Miles Per Hour. Al Nilsen hated the name and wrote a short story, as a method of proposing a new name, Miles “Tails” Monotail. The story warmed everyone’s heart, and eventually, there was a compromise. The official name of the fox would be Miles Prower, and Tails would be the nickname.
During the development of the game, the two sides of the studio found it difficult to work together. Cultural and language barriers prevented the Japanese and Americans from working together fluidly, except for Cerny himself who was fluent in Japanese. Craig Stitt, one of the American artists on the game felt that many of the American contributions to the game were either dropped or reworked simply because it came from the American side.

Development of Sonic CD Continues

In Japan, development continued for Sonic CD. During the early meetings between Sega of Japan and the Sega Technical Institute, some of the ideas that were floated back and forth were considered for both projects, however as development truly got underway dramatic differences began to emerge. The most noticeable were the supporting characters. Where Tails was introduced in Sonic 2, a female character named Amy Rose would be added, as well as an additional antagonist in the form of Metal Sonic. Another idea that was discussed for Sonic 2 that would only be used in Sonic CD was time travel. This element gave Sonic CD its most defining feature, extremely unique level design, allowing for Sonic to travel to the same levels in different timelines. Past, Present, Bad Future and Good Future.
Another key difference between Sonic CD and Sonic 2 was the pressure. Oshima has been quoted as saying that because they were not making a “numbered sequel” the pressure was not as high as he felt it probably was on Naka, Cerny, and the rest of the Technical Institute. During the final days of development, the Sonic 2 team needed to fly out a large complementary group of programmers to finish the game. The reason of the pressure to finish on time, was because of the marketing of the game.

Sonic 2s Day

While Sonic 2 was in development, Al Nilsen, who had orchestrated some of the more effective marketing campaigns for the first game, and Madeline Schroeder, the “mother of Sonic” came up with an idea that was revolutionary at the time: A street date for the release of Sonic 2. Named Sonic 2s Day, the goal was to have the game released on the same day around the globe. Ultimately the game was released a few days earlier in Japan, but the rest of the world saw the game come out on Tuesday, November 24th.
As with Sonic 1, the music of Sonic 2 was created by Masato Nakamura, leader of the Band Dreams Come True. However Sonic CD decided to go a different route using music composed by Naofumi Hataya and Masafumi Ogata. At least, that was the case in the Japanese and European versions. To much dismay, the US Version was completely rescored with a different sound than the Japanese version, eschewing the electronica-dance sound in favor of a jazz fusion approach. The original Japanese soundtrack would be available in the 2011 re-release of the game.

Reception and Legacy: Sonic 2 and Sonic CD

The game was another smashing success for Sega, Naka, and company. Despite the short production schedule, they managed to create a sequel which managed to not just rehash the ideas of the original, but enhanced gameplay mechanics. Most magazines would give high praise to Sonic 2 as well, except for one, UK Based magazine GamesMaster which rated Sonic 2 a 65 out of 100. Perhaps harshness was because it was the first issue of the magazine and they were looking to make a name for themselves. Or perhaps the criticism of the game being too easy and being too derivative of the first one were their honest assessment. In editor Jim Douglas’s final assessment, he states: “Technical excellence alone, which Sonic has in spades, does not a good game make.” Despite this outlier, the game received mostly good marks.
Sonic CD would also be well received with its unique time traveling level design, however, given that the Sega CD was an add-on, it naturally had a smaller install base leading to lower sales of Sonic CD to Sonic 2. Sonic CD still managed relatively impressive sales.

Game Development: Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles

The Sega Technical Institute would see some changes after the release of Sonic 2 with Mark Cerny departing and Roger Hector, a veteran of Atari, stepping in to lead the division. Yuji Naka, Hirokazu Yasuhara, and the Sonic Team that had taken residency at the Technical Institute would stay on to begin work on Sonic 3. However this would come with a caveat – Naka wanted to only work with the Japanese developers at the Technical Institute, to avoid the conflicts that occurred during the development of Sonic 2.
With each Sonic game, Naka and team were growing more ambitious. Initial concepts of Sonic 3 involved using an isometric point of view, which would end up shelved and used instead for Sonic 3D blast. As with previous Sonic games, Sonic 3 would see the introduction of a new character to the roster, Knuckles the Echidna. However, Knuckles would not be a playable character in the base version of Sonic 3. The problem was as they were developing the game, it was growing prohibitively too large, and it would be too expensive to manufacture the cartridge. Roger Hector the new head of the Technical Institute knew that there would be issues when he saw the list of ideas that were proposed.

Sonic Spinball

Not only was the game too big, but it was also going to take much longer than anticipated. Sega had tremendous success with their holiday release of Sonic 2 and wanted to replicate that success. Sonic 3 would not be ready however but Christmas of 1993 though, so it fell to the American half of the Sega Technical Institute to create something to tide fans over. The result would be Sonic Spinball, a game that took the pinball elements of the previous Sonic games, and, well made them the entire game. Spinball is not a bad game, it has some fun features, but it wasn’t the true Sonic experience despite the best efforts of the developers.

The Split

The decision was made during the alpha stages of the game to split Sonic 3 into two parts. The second part was called Sonic and Knuckles and allowed Knuckles to be a playable character. Each game could be played as a standalone, or together. Playing them together gave the gamer the original experience that the team envisioned when designing the game. In a fun twist, attaching Sonic 2 to the Sonic and Knuckles, cartridge allowed the player to play as Knuckles in Sonic 2.

The King of Pop

Aside from the lock-on cartridges, the most interesting piece about the development of Sonic 3 was the potential inclusion of Michael Jackson onto the team to provide the musical score. Dreams Come True had become relatively popular in the time between Sonic 2 and 3, and their cost had gone up significantly. Michael Jackson however, a fan of the game, was interested in taking on the job. However, he is not credited in the final game. There are multiple accounts as to what happened. In one version of the story, Jackson’s involvement in the project was terminated by Sega after the news of pedophilia charges came out. Another version of the same story posits that Jackson left the project when he became frustrated with the methods of creating the music, much like Nakamura was with Sonic 1.
Unfortunately, it would take nearly eight months to deliver the two halves of the game in the United States and Europe. In Japan, there was a delay in delivering the first half as the team attempted to jam both halves onto one cart. This plan was ultimately abandoned and the game was released with the “lock-on” technology that the other regions received.

Reception and Legacy: Sonic 3 And Knuckles

While Sonic 3 was, well-received sales were noticeably down from the successes of the first two games. Each “part” of the game so to speak sold over a million copies, down from the multi-million sales of the previous games. There could have been several reasons for this to happen; perhaps marketing had run out of the magic juice to get people interested. Or perhaps simply it was a case of fatigue setting in as there were five Sonic releases between 1991 and 1994. Whatever the case the downturn marked a perfect timing for a break. When the next big Sonic game would arrive, it would be at a markedly different Sega.

Closing

Sonic and Knuckles would be the last “main” game to be released for the 16-bit generation. In the next video, we will start with the discussion of the 32-bit era for Sonic, or lack thereof, and continue to present day. If you enjoyed the video, please let me know in the comments below.  If I missed anything, please let me know on the pinned fact check comment. One of the difficult things with this project has been the number of sources that have slightly different versions of the same information. However, if you have another source for me to check out, let me know! If you enjoy this content, please consider subscribing with notifications. My name is Spoiler Kevin, and I will see you in the next video.