100 Things You Never Knew About Resident Evil
40. Resident Evil Was The PlayStation's Fastest Megahit
Resident Evil is too big to fail these days. If you were to look at Capcom's Platinum Titles - a list of their best-sellers - most of the top 10 are Resident Evil games. That wasn't always the case though, and with video game horror being such an unknown entity, RE1 was considered a huge risk.
According to Yoshiki Okamoto, Resident Evil wasn't the first but it was certainly the fastest game to sell 1 million copies at the time. In fact, from it's release in the last week of March to the end of the year, RE1 sold 1 million copies in Japan alone, making it the 4th best-selling game of the year (behind Super Mario RPG, Tekken 2 and the original Pokémon). In the US, it also sold 1 million copies by September - just six months of being available. Being a smash hit all around the world, Resident Evil became the best-selling PlayStation up to that point.
By the end of the console's lifespan, Wikipedia tracks Resident Evil as the 17th best-selling game for the system with over 5 million units shipped (and RE2 sitting a little above in 14th place).
Not bad considering original sales expectations were originally in the tens of thousands.