The topic today is personal. Because I’m writing about the game that made me the man I am today. Loud words, but I believe it is responsible for my addiction to hoarding unnecessary shit, keeping it in a weird order, and numbering everything for safekeeping purposes. The game that basically defined survivor horror.
Now, as you already know, I am not a historian. I am not a hardcore fan who quotes his favorite things word by word. I am just a guy who thinks he is a creative idiot (aka glorified typist). I don’t know about the subject, I just remembered about it. Maybe right, maybe wrong. That’s just how memories work. But anyway, what I wanted to say before this detour – Resident Evil, according to what I suspect was the first game in its class. Silent Hill was released a bit later (maybe the same or the next year), so Resident Evil basically took the lead.
I don’t know how many people remember the first Resident Evil. The Resident Evil before characters became super-tough operators, Kung-Fu masters, and badasses capable of punching out giant boulders into oblivion. Before there was a giant lady and her three deranged daughters, which would shape strange fetishes for the new generation (I can guarantee that). Before the cool coats. Before the first person (even though, let us be honest, RE7 and RE8 weren’t the first, the first was obviously RE Gun Survivor). Before the graphics. Before running mutated werewolf-like monsters. Before puzzles for decapitated chickens. And before the goo-like monsters. Yes, the first Resident Evil.
What was Resident Evil I? Well, basically, it was just one of the scariest and the most interesting games of my childhood. It started with a cinematic of a dude looking back, seeing the camera approaching, and getting scared. Happens to all of us. And then the low voice says: “Resident Evil.” And that’s it. You’re in for a ride.
You choose out of two characters. Chris Redfield – the man, the myth, the legend. The person who basically radiates concentrated testosterone and changes his appearance from game to game. And Jill Valentine – not as popular, however, still a generator of some insider jokes about sandwiches. Also a good, strictly platonic, best friend in the whole world of Chris Redfield on his quest to find a perfect match for his sister to keep Redfield’s bloodline alive. Now, I don’t know where this came from, and to be honest, I fear to ask, I just accept it as part of lore and reality.
So, you choose one of those two daredevils. Both are cops. And not just cops, but members of super-duper-cool special forces STARS (like SWAT, but neither they have special weapons nor tactics). And depending on who you choose, you’re going to have a hard time or a little bit less hard time surviving. Yes, characters basically were the definition of the difficulty.
You chose Chris, and all you had, in the beginning, was a knife and Semper Fi Motherfucker mentality, because Chris, like a true jarhead, somehow lost his firearm but doesn’t make a big deal out of it. You chose Jill, and you had a gun, a lockpick, and constant life-saving trips with her personal red-bearded guardian angel Barry Burton (I still remember their names, alright?).
Now, let me get this straight. This game was published back in the first half of the 90s. So it was hard as a motherfucker. This game didn’t give a shit about your mentality disorders, your crippling ADHD, your hurt feelings, whether you were eight years old or a gaming journalist (got the reference?). This game was there to punish you, kick your ass into submission and make you want to return for more if you have some spirit of a fighter or make you accept that you’re just a giant pussy and probably shouldn’t play video games in the 90s.
And let’s be honest here for a moment – games in the 80s and 90s were hard as fuck, even if they were designed for children… or maybe especially for children. And I’m not a tough guy. Never was. Never will be. I didn’t have a special mentality (only if you won’t consider the word special in different connotations). I was a pussy. A quitter. And Resident Evil frustrated the shit out of me. Worse than Spyro, and maybe precisely like Crash Bandicoot.
I was angry, I was desperate, I was scared. And I wanted more. After every dumb death, I wanted to get back for more. I played as Chris, and I had a knife, and I was a dumb little kid. I didn’t know how to speed run this shit knife only (it’s now I am this good I can speed run Resident Evil 8 knife only). In fact, in the first game, the knife was fucking useless. Whoever tells you otherwise is either a no-lifer or lies.
So yeah, imagine you’re a kid in a mansion full of zombies, and all you have is a knife and a shitty attitude. That was me. And I sucked. The first zombie killed me several times in a row because I was so dense I couldn’t imagine running away and not attempting to kill it. I was brought up by Doom, by Dangerous Dave. The games where you take heads on the enemies and make them pay. Not here. Here, in most of the situations, the best option is to run away and conserve resources. And resources were scarce. This wasn’t similar to later instances of the game where developers were generous with ammo and healing items (hell, in later parts, it was a damn shooter where you could roundhouse zombies, basically making zombie apocalypse seem less of a problem than the story tries to show).
To make it even worse, zombies weren’t the only problem. Mutated dogs, crows, and frog-like sons of bitches (aka hunters) made sure your life won’t be easy in any meaningful way. And also, there were mutant bees (yeah, those motherfuckers turned your life into living hell) and bosses. Now, I don’t remember too many bosses, but those I remember were one terrifying things. I think the first boss you meet was a giant snake. And this reptilian piece of shit made your life hard for a while (I can remember at least two encounters). In fact, that’s where the game had some variety to it.
Playing as Chris, you’re playing as one alpha Chad. Somewhat dumb but tough (well, basically that’s his role for the rest of the series). And being alpha, you have to save an obligatory damsel in distress. The damsel is a girl paramedic from the less lucky team (I think it was Bravo, but I could mix them up with RE5), and her name is Rebecca. And this Rebecca doesn’t stop spitting bullshit, even though there is an urge to tell her to shut up. But she is extremely useful. She can heal you free of charge (I think only three times, but still, free of charge), and in case you got bitten by the said giant snake, you could be saved by Rebecca, who all of a sudden carries your unconscious ass all the way to the safe-room (I think there’s also an option to get there yourself, but once again – not 100% sure). Nothing special, yet a pleasant little surprise.
And if you thought the giant snake was bad, developers held onto something much worse. At least for me. Sharks. Yep, zombie sharks. And not just any sharks, but great white sharks. Now those things are scary by themselves. Now imagine they get a portion of the virus and turn the shit all the way up to 11. Should I say the first time I saw them I was like: “Oh no! No! No! No! God please, no! Don’t make me go in there, please let me skip!” Well, tough luck. I had to conquer my fears and go against the sharks. To my satisfaction, the sequence wasn’t this long and in 10-15 minutes you were shark-free. Good times.
Also, there were some mutant plants (basically made your life miserable for a good part of the game) and an obligatory big bad guy. Tyrant. The archenemy of the series. And if I’m not wrong, you had to fight him twice. The first time in the laboratory, where he mauled Wesker (another villain and future Neo of the series), and later on the helipad while your time runs out, self-destruction protocol activated, and you’re waiting for the miracle in the form of bazooka. Yeah, it ends with a big bang. And not just Tyrant, the mansion explodes, too. Epic. Since then, it has been considered a good tone to blow up the mansion, the village, the town, the country, the planet.
And when I played as Jill, the game all of a sudden turned out to be much easier. Jill had a handgun from the start, she had more inventory slots, she had lockpicks, and she had Barry. I was shocked when I saw how Barry took out the first zombie for me. And then he saved you from the falling ceiling (The Jill-sandwich joke came from this situation). And did a lot of other useful stuff. Jill knew stuff, could do stuff and in comparison to Chris (simple guy, straightforward guy) felt like a real genius. Playing a game as Jill was an easy, fun, and less terrifying experience. Yes, the majority of the time, you still were alone, but somehow knowing that Barry was around made it less scary.
Now I have to mention something very important. Something that made the game almost too hard for me. The puzzles. Oh yeah, boys and girls, the puzzles in this game were hardcore. Maybe not Silent Hill 1-2 kind of hardcore, but hardcore nevertheless. You had to think and think a lot. Keys, passcodes, passwords, pressing the right buttons in the right order, and everything in between. This crap wasn’t for faint hearts. This game didn’t care about your feelings. If you had trouble understanding the logic behind everything – too bad there were not a lot of tips scattered around. Well, maybe there were certain indications in notes on what you should do, but mainly you had to apply the good-old – what else can I open – kind of mindset.
Of course, I couldn’t forget about the chest and the safe room. Safe room and chest. Those two things were basically the indicator that you were in a safe environment, far from danger (even if danger basically lurked behind every corner or waited for you outside). The music in the safe room, the noise of typing machine working. All those sounds were the best. They made you feel safe and calm you down. And the chest made sure you suffered from organizatory and hoarding issues. Because as soon as you got the grip of the chest – that was it. You couldn’t stop. You had to collect all the items, sort them in alphabet order and by the amount. And make sure by the end of the game you had as many health items, bullets, and ribbons as possible. Yes, you could use all that to make the game easier, but what’s the point? This was the way. No other option. And surprisingly, I never heard about anyone who didn’t suffer from the same syndrome. The chest was the main and sole purpose of the game. I think if there were no zombies, just the chest and the mansion full of stuff you could put in the chest, it would still be one banger of the game.
All in all, this game was and is one of my favorite survival horrors. I know there were many more scary games (take Silent Hill, for example; in my humble opinion, this thing was light-years scarier than Resident Evil), but this one was the first. It was fun. Maybe I would play it sometime in the future, but not now.