Resident Evil
Photo credit: Photo: Evan-Amos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The PlayStation shocker that dropped you inside a zombie-infested mansion with too few bullets and a save ribbon to ration. It didn't just scare a generation — it named the whole survival-horror genre.
Resident Evil was developed and published by Capcom and released for the PlayStation in 1996, arriving in Japan on March 22 and in North America on April 1. Directed by Shinji Mikami, it put you in control of Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, members of a special police unit called S.T.A.R.S. trapped inside the Spencer Mansion and forced to survive its zombies and monsters while unravelling what went wrong there.
It was the first game to be dubbed 'survival horror,' and the label stuck to an entire genre. The tension came as much from the controls as the creatures: tank-style movement and fixed camera angles panning across eerie pre-rendered backgrounds meant you often heard a threat before you could see it, and limited ammunition kept every encounter fraught.
The game was a commercial force, selling roughly four million units and grossing more than $200 million by December 1997. Its success launched what became Capcom's biggest franchise, branching out over the years into comics, novels, films, and a long line of sequels — but it all started in that mansion, on a gray PlayStation, with a door slowly creaking open.
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