10 Video Games With Bizarre Origin Stories
9. Resident Evil Saved Capcom
Whilst Resident Evil wasn’t the first horror video game ever made, it was certainly an attempt by one Capcom developer to prove that the genre was viable within the gaming space.
Tokuro Fujiwara had previously developed an NES tie-in to the horror movie Sweet Home. The game was a success but Fujiwara felt that the limitations of the console stilted his true vision. Convincing Capcom to work on a spiritual successor, Fujiwara acted as producer and handed-picked some fresh blood to work on his pet project in Shinji Mikami.
The game went through various different conceptual stages; starting life as an SNES game before hopping to the PlayStation, morphing from first person to the fixed camera angles and shifting away from the supernatural into zombies and mad science.
As it got close to release however, the game was nearly canned. Capcom had sailed along on the success of Street Fighter II in the early 90s but that well was drying up. The fighting game’s sequels had failed to sell and 3D games were far more expensive to produce. The company hired an American business advisor who suggested pulling the plug on Resident Evil but Fujiwara pleaded that his superiors see it through to the end.
Resident Evil, when it was released, became the best selling PlayStation game of all time and saved Capcom from financial ruin.