One of the most important horror video games of all time is Resident Evil, developed by Capcom and directed by Shinji Mikami in 1996. Since its release, the game has spawned an over 100 million unit selling franchise and become one of the cornerstones of the “survival horror” genre it helped to create. While Mikami left Capcom after the closure of Clover Studio in 2007, he has remained vocal about his opinion on the Resident Evil series. Now, in the most recent video documentary from Japanese YouTube channel Archipel, Mikami discusses the inspirations behind the original Resident Evil.
While it is no secret by now that the original Resident Evil started out as a spiritual successor to the Japan exclusive horror RPG Sweet Home for the Famicom (NES), Mikami revealed that Capcom had initially approached him to make another horror game using mechanics from Sweet Home, including a first-person camera and an emphasis on ghosts as the game’s enemies. Mikami claims that after watching George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead he was inspired to focus the game around zombies instead.
The inclusion of zombies as the main enemy type was also made to make Resident Evil more accessible to non-horror fans, as Mikami thought that using Sweet Home as a foundation lead to him creating concepts that worked well for “core horror fans” but would not deliver sales-wise. The next inspiration Shinji Mikami sites is Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Mikami references a scene in which the villain Leatherface kills a character and drags them across the floor, which inspired the introduction of Resident Evil’s hunter enemy.
In discussing the original version’s first-person camera, Mikami claims that he had been designing Resident Evil to feature a first-person perspective up until he had seen Infogrames’ 1992 DOS horror game Alone in the Dark, which inspired him to consider using pre-rendered backgrounds for the game’s environments. Pursuing a first-person camera could have put Resident Evil at risk of going over-budget, as the team was inexperienced with 3D game design at the time. In discussing the decision to use fixed camera perspectives, Mikami states that “In the end, many players told me that they thought that view made the game scarier. To which I say it was just a workaround.”
The creation of Resident Evil is just one of the many things discussed in the first part of Archipel’s documentary on Shinji Mikami. In the video, the legendary game director discusses his work on the likes of Dino Crisis and other Resident Evil titles, revealing that Resident Evil 3 was originally intended to be a spin-off aimed at core fans of the franchise before Capcom forced the team to broaden its appeal and restructure it as a numbered entry. He also discusses how Resident Evil – Code: Veronica was intended to be a numbered entry in the series before Capcom and Sega came to a disagreement over its Dreamcast exclusivity.
Mikami also briefly discusses his roles as a director and producer on titles, as well as his disappointment in the Resident Evil games made after his time at Capcom, but claims to have been a fan of Resident Evil 7: biohazard, as well as the state of the horror genre in both video games and film as a whole. Shinji Mikami is currently the executive producer at Tango GameWorks on titles such as The Evil Within 2 and Ghostwire: Tokyo.
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