Franchises
Resident Evil
Resident Evil landed on PlayStation in 1996 and defined the term survival horror. A mansion in the woods outside Raccoon City, fixed camera angles, pre-rendered backdrops and controls that turned the character rather than moving her directly — everything served the goal of keeping the player from seeing around the corner and leaving them uneasy. Add a cramped inventory, scarce ammunition and a typewriter that allowed exactly as many saves as you had ink ribbons left. The tension came less from jump scares than from arithmetic: do I have enough bullets to walk down that corridor one more time?
The second game, starring Leon and Claire, widened the structure into two interlocking campaigns, Nemesis added a pursuer that tracks the player across the city, and Code: Veronica moved the series into fully three-dimensional environments on the Dreamcast. The GameCube remake of the first game is still regarded as one of the finest revisits of an old title ever made. The real revolution, though, came with Resident Evil 4 and its over-the-shoulder camera and real-time aiming — within a few years the whole industry had adopted its layout of action. When the sixth entry drowned in gunfire, Resident Evil 7 pulled the series back into first person and into one claustrophobic house, while the remakes of the second and third games showed that the classic floor plan still works more than twenty years on.
Entries in the series (31)
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Resident Evil · 1996
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Resident Evil 3: Nemesis · 1999
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Resident Evil Survivor · 2000
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Resident Evil: Code Veronica · 2000
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Resident Evil Gaiden · 2001
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Resident Evil 0 · 2002
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Resident Evil: Dead Aim · 2003
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Resident Evil Outbreak · 2004
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Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition · 2007
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Resident Evil 5 · 2009
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Resident Evil 6 · 2012
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Resident Evil: Revelations · 2012
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Resident Evil Revelations 2 · 2015
- PS4
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Resident Evil 7: Biohazard · 2017
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Resident Evil 3 · 2020
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Resident Evil Village · 2021
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Resident Evil 4 VR Mode · 2023
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