Developer : Capcom
Release date : March 22, 1996
Synopsis :
Resident Evil[b] is a 1996 survival horror video game developed and published by Capcom originally for the PlayStation. It is the first title in Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise. Players control Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, members of the elite task force S.T.A.R.S., who must escape a mansion infested with zombies and other monsters.
Conceived by producer Tokuro Fujiwara as a remake of his earlier horror game Sweet Home (1989), the development of Resident Evil was led by Shinji Mikami. It went through several redesigns, first as Super NES game in 1993, then a fully 3D first-person PlayStation game in 1994 and finally a third-person game. Gameplay consists of action, exploration, puzzle solving and inventory management. Resident Evil establishes many conventions seen later in the series, including the control scheme, inventory system, save system, and use of 3D models superimposed over pre-rendered backgrounds.
Resident Evil was praised for its graphics, gameplay, sound, and atmosphere, although it received criticism for its voice acting. It was an international best-seller, and became the best-selling PlayStation game ever at the time. By December 1997, it had sold about 4 million copies worldwide and had grossed more than $200,000,000 (equivalent to $346,000,000 in 2021).
Resident Evil is often cited as one of the most influential and greatest video games. It is credited with defining the survival horror genre and with returning zombies to popular culture, leading to a renewed interest in zombie films by the 2000s. It created a franchise including video games, films, comics, novels, and other merchandise. It has been ported to Sega Saturn, Windows and Nintendo DS. In 2002, a Resident Evil remake was released for the GameCube and ported to other platforms in 2015. A sequel, Resident Evil 2, was released in 1998, and a prequel, Resident Evil Zero, in 2002.
On July 24, 1998, when a series of bizarre murders occur on the outskirts of the fictional Midwestern town of Raccoon City, the Raccoon City Police Department’s S.T.A.R.S. team are assigned to investigate. After contact with Bravo Team is lost, Alpha Team is sent to investigate their disappearance. Alpha Team locates Bravo Team’s crashed helicopter and land at the site, where they are suddenly attacked by a pack of monstrous dogs. After Alpha Team’s helicopter pilot, Brad Vickers, panics and takes off alone, the remaining members of the team — Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Albert Wesker, and Barry Burton — are forced to seek refuge in a nearby abandoned mansion. Depending on which character the player chooses to assume control of (Chris or Jill), either Barry or Chris are separated from the rest of the team during the chase and do not make it to the mansion. The team decides to investigate the mansion to search for their missing team member.
As the team members explore the mansion, they encounter dangerous creatures roaming its halls. The player character eventually learns that a series of illegal experiments were being undertaken by a clandestine research team under the supervision of biomedical company Umbrella Corporation. The creatures roaming the mansion and its surrounding areas are the results of these experiments, which have exposed the mansion’s personnel and various animals and insects to a highly contagious and mutagenic biological agent known as the T-virus. The player character may also encounter several members of Bravo Team, including Enrico Marini, who reveals that one of Alpha Team’s members is a traitor before being shot and killed by an unseen assailant.
Eventually, the player character discovers a secret underground laboratory containing Umbrella’s experiments. In the lab, the player encounters Wesker, who reveals that he is a double agent working for Umbrella, and plans to use the Tyrant, a giant humanoid supersoldier, to kill the remaining S.T.A.R.S. members. However, in the ensuing confrontation, Wesker is supposedly killed, and the player character defeats the Tyrant. After activating the lab’s self-destruct system, the player character reaches the heliport and manages to contact Brad for extraction, at which point the player may be confronted by Tyrant one last time.
The game features multiple endings depending on the player’s actions at key points over the course of the game. The best ending sees that the player character saves their partner (Rebecca Chambers for Chris’s campaign, and Barry for Jill’s campaign) as well as a team member imprisoned in the lab (Jill for Chris’s campaign, and vice versa). If at least the partner survives, the Tyrant is defeated and the mansion destroyed, otherwise the mansion remains intact and the Tyrant remains loose in the forest if the partner or team member is left to permanently die.
Source : Wikipedia
