With a groan, it rises. The first Resident Evil is a piece of horror game history, and it has just come shambling back to PC after a long time putrefying. Ye olde games shoppe, GOG.com is selling the 1996 survival horror classic as a digital download, so you don’t have to go rummaging through eBay auctions to find an original physical copy anymore. It’s going for £9/$10. But the smile-raiser is the revelation that its sequels, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, will also be getting reanimated in their original polygonal glory.
Resident Evil was first ported to Windows back in 1997, after its release on PlayStation. It got a few re-releases soon after that, mostly updated editions. But time scratches all surfaces, and the PC port was left languishing even while the old version of the game reappeared digitally on the classics catalogue of PlayStation. Now, it’s playable again on PC. (Well, it’s long been playable to anyone who cared enough to emulate it, but that’s another story…)
The GOG re-release promises very few changes, aside from support for modern controllers, “new rendering options” and “improved timing of the cutscenes”. It’s fun to read the original description that would have been splashed on the back of the game’s box. “Completely uncut, with even more blood, graphic violence and gory scenes than the worldwide monster hit version on PlayStation,” it says. Please understand, it was the 1990s, people loved seeing exposed intestines. It was an interesting decade.
The sequels are also going to see a re-release. “Capcom’s Resident Evil series has defined and revolutionized the survival horror genre,” say GOG in a post on their forums, where they point out you can now wishlist both sequels. None of these should be confused with the Resident Evil remake of 2002, the Resident Evil 2 remake of 2019, or the Resident Evil 3 remake of 2020. But those are all pretty swell survival horrors too.
My personal memory of Resident Evil is getting it from a friend while hankering badly for its sequel, which I was reading about in every magazine I could find. I played up until the first zombie, whose iconic head-turn freaked me the flip out, whereupon I stopped playing and went to hang out with my dad in another well-lit room. I told this story enough times that my brother now recounts it as a memory of his own. That’s okay, it’s a good memory, we can share it.