100 Things You Never Knew About Resident Evil

But why Matilda?

Leon's personal Heckler & Koch VPN70 becomes a recurring weapon after it's first appearance in Resident Evil 2, earning the nickname Matilda as of Resident Evil 4. This is partly because this game took a harder turn away from real world gun names, but if nothing else Capcom took the opportunity to make one of it's many references to cinema with it. 

Matilda is the name of the female protagonist played by Natalie Portman (in her film debut) in the 1993 Luc Besson classic Léon: The Professional. The connection? Magnifique. 

But it's hardly the only RE gun with references in it. In RE4 alone there's the Killer7, which is a shout-out to the Capcom game of the same name and it's also based the AMT Hardball from 1984's The Terminator. The Remington 870 shotgun also appears in both RE4 and Terminator 2, and the remake of RE4 continues this love of Terminator weapons further by including the Winchester 1887 as the "Skull Shaker"; the T-800's infamous one-handed shotgun which Leon can flipcock in the game just like Arnie used to.