Before the series tried desperately to ape the Gears series in the action-stakes with the most recent titles, Resident Evil was a more ponderous item-gathering exploration game just one chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle away from being a point and click adventure. It suited then, that visionary director Shinji Mikami take the old style of spooky locales and terrifying enemies and - in a revolutionary move - instead placed the camera behind you, letting you roam through the demonic-villager-infested environment with a perspective that had YOU right in the middle of the action. In a rather Wicker Man-esque move (not the Nicolas Cage one) you played as agent Leon Kennedy; a man tasked with retrieving the President's daughter after she's been nabbed by a mysterious cult. Needless to say with it being a horror game things only escalate from there, but if you ask any gamer about the great horror titles of yore, they'll instantly bring up Resident Evil 4. It might not seem like much today, but back in 2005 the idea of a perspective that would follow you from behind was a truly innovative and genuinely amazing move, the likes of which has influenced every over-the-shoulder perspective shooter since, providing quite a bit of irony as with time moving forward Resident Evil would come to resemble the very action-shooters it first allowed to exist.
