Every Boss Fight book tends to have a novel approach depending on the author, and Phillip J Reed is no different with his Resident Evil volume. In fact, his approach is distinctly unusual, with the praise for the originator of survival horror from 1996 veiled behind calling it a cheesy rip-off. Nevertheless, the story he tells is a compelling one in regard to the original game’s importance, much of which is locked behind a specific cultural moment and context we couldn’t bring back even if we wanted to.
Reed’s narrative is framed around his own first experience playing the game as a kid in grade school, with other kids. Reed didn’t like horror games in general. He didn’t even like Resident Evil that much. Indeed, the first chapter quite literally ends with him stammering that Resident Evil is just Alone in the Dark, a game he actually did play at the time. But in retrospect, Alone in the Dark is mostly resembled for being an obvious predecessor to Resident Evil, and really, probably the only game before Resident Evil itself that can reasonably be quantified as survival horror.
Where Reed starts to appreciate Resident Evil as more than a rip-off is the distinctly cinematic scope of the title, which took advantage of the still relatively novel CD format for video games to make aggressive use of voice acting and even live action scenes. The cheesiness of video game voice acting, up until Resident Evil, had generally worked against most CD games. But Resident Evil had the surprising advantage of taking itself seriously no matter how silly the poorly translated script got. There’s a good reason why Lloyd Kaufman of Toxic Avenger fame, of all people, wrote the foreward for this book. Resident Evil almost perfectly typifies camp.
One of Reed’s more interesting arguments, although I suppose he frames them more as descriptions, is how Resident Evil and Biohazard really do need to be interpreted as completely different games. It’s not just that the Biohazard audience in Japan couldn’t easily tell that the game’s English dialog sounds ridiculous. There’s also the common practice of the time where games, upon being imported to the United States, had their difficulty ramped up to dissuade game rentals as opposed to purchases. In Reed’s memories, Resident Evil is tense in part because it is very easy to die unexpectedly. Ammo is limited, and any unexpected surprise has high potential stakes, with all the tedium implied of having to backtrack through endless loading screens.
Even the loading screens, mind you, work to amplify this vibe by raising the tension. Resident Evil is very much a paradox in that it’s the more archaic, inconvenient parts of the game, the sort of thing fixed by quality-of-life improvements in modern titles, that made Resident Evil so memorable. The game is a clumsy mess where you don’t really have any idea what you’re getting into. It’s precisely that quality which makes the various turnabouts in the story compelling, encouraging a child like Reed to pick up little notes of backstory and lore, then jumble that around in his head during the gameplay experience to build an unsettling story where man is the greatest monster of all.
Resident Evil didn’t exactly break new storytelling ground in any way that can easily be communicated in text. Rather, the game was noteworthy because of its sheer immersive qualities. The voice actors, as well as the live action models, are compelling professionals despite the poor quality of their script. In one sense, the ramshackle nature of the whole production just amplifies the mystery. Reed openly acknowledges that there are some things about Resident Evil we may well never know. Many of the actors he finds didn’t even know they were in such a famous game until quite some time later.
Resident Evil is an artifact of a time where video games weren’t quite big business yet, but some people had faith enough in the concept that they were willing to try for something big, even if they weren’t quite sure how it was going to come out. And really, I doubt anyone could have intentionally come up with this game’s strange mishmash of powerful ambience and goofy execution. Never knowing where on that spectrum the next room is going to land is a huge part of the fun.
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