The film is based on a popular topic "Success story. » There are success stories of businessmen, politicians, directors. Why there can’t be a video game success story? Video in the style of the book “Blood, Sweat and Pixels”. The author drew his inspiration from it.
Getting acquainted with the development of Resident Evil is worth starting with the personality of the game director. Shinji Mikami. Japanese.
Shinji entered the gaming industry quite by accident in 1990, when he turned 25 years old. He will graduate from Doshisha University and plan to devote his life to shopping and collecting orders for products, merchandising. The young company Capcom or, as we say, Capcom, will organize a graduation party with its own money, where it will invite all graduates. The company needs young blood. At graduation, Shinji will present his graduation project on merchandising, Capcom will offer him a job.
Shinji will move 50 kilometers from Kyoto to the neighboring large city of Osaka, where Capcom rents an office. The campaign will not entrust a responsible task to a green newcomer. Every game is a monetary risk. To show his abilities, Shinji will develop his first little-known game for the Game Boy in three months.
Shinji has been interested in cinema since childhood. In his free time from work, he watches horror films. Particularly loves The Shining (1980), Jaws (1975) and Night of the Living Dead (1968). The latter will play an important role in his career.
Shinji’s boss will be the elder 29-year-old Tokuro Fujiwara, the man he will consider to be a sansei. Fujiwara is considered an experienced person in Capcom by the age of 90. From ’82 to ’83, he managed to gain experience at the competitive company Konami in the same city of Osaka. At that time, a young student-intern, Hideo Kojima, was working under the same roof with him. Only then he wasn’t making Death Stranding, but an uninteresting game about a penguin running on ice.
In the early 90s, Capcom believed that consoles were created for children, so they made games based on popular cartoons. Young Shinji will invent four video games in three years.
The last one, Aladdin, will be released in November 1993 and will become a bestseller. Just think! 1 million and seven hundred and fifty thousand cartridges sold! That’s a lot of money! Shinji’s business is going well and he has already mastered the features of the Game Boy and Super Nintendo consoles well. His boss Fujiwara will note that it’s time to move on.
The head of the Capcom Osaka console department, Tokuro Fujiwara, will call Shinji to his office to congratulate his talented subordinate and discuss future plans.
Fujiwara will invite Shinji to make a remake of his old game Sweet Home (1989). New games come out so often that it’s good to refresh the classics. The plan is to quickly develop a remake for Super Nintendo and sell it in some small edition of about 200 thousand copies. You shouldn’t worry too much about quality – they won’t remember the game in 5 years anyway. November ’93 and will be the start of work on RESIDENT EVIL 1 (1996). Neither of the two men realizes in ’93 that the game is in for many surprises. It won’t go to waste, it will glorify the first PlayStation and make Shinji famous all over the world. And all thanks to chance and Shinji’s unyielding character.
Shinji will immediately get excited about the idea and let his imagination run wild. So, let there be four special forces heroes in the game, let there be a guy and a girl, let there be a black joker who looks like comedian Eddie Murphy. It looks like! A? Let there be a Caucasian cyborg. This latter will hold the ceiling with his mechanical hand so that it does not fall on the girl and crush her.
And so that they all run around an abandoned mansion, like the heroes of the film The Shining (1980). And so that there would be zombies, like in the movie “Night of the Living Dead” (1968). It’s clear that the 28-year-old guy is bored to death with games based on children’s cartoons. The soul of the future master will ask for cruelty and horror.
Since Shinji becomes a DIRECTOR, he will gain freedom and will be in creative search for six months, from the winter of ’93 to the end of spring of ’94. During this time, he will write 40 pages of the script and will play Sweet Home the length and breadth.
Sweet Home is a horror jRPG. Heroes walk around the mansion in groups, collect keys from locked doors, solve puzzles and fight in turn-based battles with ghosts. They are the ones who prevent the heroes from leaving the mansion. And there’s also nasty squeaky music.
At the end of spring 1994, Shinji came with a folder with a script and sketches to his boss. His boss Fujiwara is puzzled. Ambitious Shinji will say that he wants to copy the original not as a carbon copy, but with artistic deviations. For example, it will turn a jRPG into a shooter, like Doom, which was popular at that time, and replace ghosts with the living dead. The main theme in the game will be fear. To make the player’s hands shake with excitement. Fujiwara will make his corrections and give his subordinate the green light.
Capcom in ’93 is divided https://winitcasinoonline.co.uk/bonus/ into three studios, each occupied by two or three games simultaneously. In each studio, artists and programmers are shared, unemployed move from one game to another, within the studio. Of course, there is not enough money for all new games, whichever game does well, they invest in that one. Fujiwara’s “green light” is not all. Shinji will still compete for his Resident Evil 1.
The work has just begun, and in the meantime there will be restlessness inside the Oska studio. For six months now, there have been rumors about the first 3D Capcom game. Cunning Shinji will want to make a breakthrough game that no one will spare money on. He will promote the idea of making the game in 3D. Komada Shinji of 80 people will be called “polygonal” with healthy distrust.
Polygonal?! In 1994 there were only rumors about 3D graphics; not everyone understood how it worked. Changes in work will affect artists. The artist will turn into a sculptor with a mouse. Just as a sculptor carves a statue from a granite block with a chisel and hammer, so an artist, with the click of a mouse, will begin to carve a rectangle-polygon so that it turns into a hero. Then the model will be dumped onto a floppy disk and taken to the director. It’s on a floppy disk, the year 94 is on the calendar. (Making a model. It turns out Chris)
Despite the mistrust of colleagues from other studios, Shinji will maintain a healthy work environment. From his interview you can see that he himself is a determined person. Thanks to his experience, two of his talented employees will go on to great careers.
In the fall of ’94, Shinji and his team will encounter serious problems. It’s not possible to make the game in 3D. Super Nintendo won’t handle the game. Neither powerful Silicon Graphics computers nor the best program for 3D artists SoftImage will help. Blame it on Shinji’s ambitions. Where to find more power?
If Shinji’s game had been released at that time, it would have looked something like this!
December ’94 will lift the team’s spirit for a short time – Sony will release its first console, PlayStation 1. It’s clear she’s powerful! When the feelings subside, it turns out that the matter smells of kerosene. Where to find a programmer for a new console? How to keep your console from burning out from complex 3D graphics?
The situation will change. RESIDENT EVIL will fall from the experimental category to the problematic category. And this is bad. The work has been going on for a year now, and there is still no clear idea, plus it is technically complex. If nothing is done, the development will be canceled and a whole year of work by more than a dozen people will go down the drain. We need to find the magic formula for success.
At the end of 1994, one year after the decision to make a remake of the game Sweet Home, Shinji and Fujiwara sat down in the office and discussed problems. The conversation will be difficult. Fujiwara will be surprised. According to his understanding, how can you screw up a game if it is a remake, which means that it is already half finished? Fujiwara, as the producer of RESIDENT EVIL, counts the money and sees that an unpromising game is dragging the studio to the bottom. He will insist on freezing the game himself so that management doesn’t find out and punish both of them for wasting money. Shinji will persistently refuse, he regrets wasted time.
Shinji is an ordinary person, of course, there will be hard days during the development of his best game. To take a break from his problems, he plays Legend of Zelda, watches movies and listens to Mozart concerts.
December ’94 will be a turning point for the fate of the game. Before the new year, Shinji Mikami will gather a team and announce that the game will close, its sequels Resident Evil 8 and Resident Evil 3 Remake will never be released, and he will jump off to start a game about Formula 1. No matter how it is! That’s not what he’ll say at an unpleasant meeting! You need to have the courage to go out to eighty colleagues and tell them to their faces that they worked in vain.
Do you know what game Resident Evil 1 wouldn’t exist without?? A? (Pause) I won’t bore you, the game will be saved by another game, even older, Alone in the Dark (1992). During Shinji’s creative crisis, one of his colleagues accidentally slips him a disc with the game “Alone in the Dark” for a change, so that he breaks away from “his Zelda”. Most of Shinji’s team in ’94 will be no more than 25 years old and almost everyone cares little about anything other than video games.
Alone in the Dark (1992) has a mansion with secrets, puzzles, notes, battles with monsters, three-dimensional heroes, hand-drawn locations. Isn’t this what Shinji himself intended for RESIDENT EVIL?? Well, well, well! Such similarities will interest the eminent Japanese. Shinji will notice that this game, similar in concept, had already been released two years earlier and became a success.
Three-dimensional characters, hand-drawn locations. Shinji has been looking for this formula for success for a whole year and now he has found it. There are games that were ahead of their time and because of this they could not open up on old consoles. Resident Evil 1 could have remained among them if not for a random colleague and a disc with the game. Three-dimensional characters, hand-drawn locations! You don’t have to wait for the right time, the game can be played by PlayStation 1! Following the example of Alone in the Dark, Shinji will decide to redraw the mansion in 2D, and leave the characters three-dimensional. And at that unpleasant meeting, Shinji will announce that he has an idea, but for this he needs to be patient and redo the game from the beginning. (Remake old locations from Bio Evil into familiar 3D)
Shinji will change the Sweet Home remake beyond recognition. Initially, Shinji planned to make a game from the first person – but it became from the third, there were black and cyborg heroes – Versker and Barry will take their place. Together with the black joker, all the jokes will disappear from the game, the game will become serious. Although no, by some miracle one will still be preserved. (Jill sandwich joke video).
Since Resident Evil 1 was originally planned to be a remake, these changes will not be the only. Initially, in the remake, the heroes had to walk in pairs, they even had to give commands to each other, work together. The game featured hero classes, like in modern MMOs. Chris and Barry were to become tanks, Rebekah – a healer, and Jill – something in between. Did chests exist?? And was it possible to rescue survivors in the mansion and bring them to the save rooms?? Although these are still my guesses. The only thing that will remain similar to the original Sweet Home is the doors opening close up. After the European-quality renovation, the game will no longer be problematic.
The game will be presented to the public for the first time – in the summer of 1995 at the festival of the video game magazine V-Jump and in September of the same year – at the Tokyo gaming exhibition. At the last one, Shinji will play the demo version himself. Will play poorly. Will often screw up and die.
Resident Evil 1 will have a huge number of versions. What is certain is that by mid-’95 Shinji will have developed his first known alpha versions. Both ended with an unexpected moment when the snake attacks the hero. At the end of January 1996, a couple of months before the game disc was sent to print, the final beta version will appear. In it you will already be able to complete the game and get into unauthorized rooms.
Capcom will notice the progress and plan to release the game in the spring of ’96. There will be little time left; you need to fix all the mistakes in six months. Shinji-san’s work schedule looks something like this: work 11 hours a day, arrive home to a rented apartment no earlier than 9 pm. The team works no less. (Show how a person works in an office in accelerated mode)
In horror, the main thing is music. (Show one moment with music and then repeat it without) Just like that – scary. And so – no longer! In September ’95, Shinji will assemble a team of three musicians and give them the task of dubbing the game. Especially memorable is the melody from the save room by the young 21-year-old Masami Ueda. For him, Resident Evil 1 will be the second game in his career. It’s not experience that decides in music, but talent.
Somewhere between the alpha and beta versions of the game, Shinji will think about cutscenes. Without them, the game is not a game. Very little is known about the screensaver with live actors. Most likely, Shinji did not have time to do everything on the computer and persuaded producer Fujiwara to fork out for the video. It is known that he will be filmed in Japan and hired to play the roles of American heroes.
Exhaustive work on the game will take Shinji 2.5 years of his life. He will deal with her from November ’93 to March ’96. If you imagine the entire development as a line, you can distinguish 4 stages. The first was planning, when no one guessed that a free remake of Sweet Home would turn into an independent game. The second is the crisis with the game at the end of 94. The third and fourth are the presentation of the game at exhibitions and the release of the finished game.
Closer to the game’s release, producer Tokuro Fujiwara will call Capcom’s American office in California and order them to prepare promotional materials for the new game. No name RESIDENT EVIL exists at this time. The game should be called BIOHAZARD. The head of the American division will check that the BIOHAZARD trademark cannot be used in the USA. In 1993, an unknown DOS game was released (I couldn’t even find any screenshots of it) and a group with the same name performed in New York. However, there is an easy way out – they will hold a vote, and the employees of the American branch will choose RESIDENT EVIL. The boss will consider him stupid, even worse than BIOHAZARD.
Resident Evil 1, Capcom’s first 3D game, will generate a lot of envious rumors within the company long before its release. One thing will unite everyone – everyone will want to see what their ambitious colleague will end up with. In January 1996, two weeks before the RESIDENT EVIL discs were sent to press, a boss from a neighboring studio appeared at Fujiwara’s studio and smashed 31-year-old Shinji’s game to smithereens. He will not like that the game has inconvenient controls, few tapes for recording and is complicated. So the player will not be able to complete the game. The management of the Californian division, on the contrary, will complain that the game is not difficult enough. In the USA, you don’t need a toy that you can go through in a couple of evenings and exchange it. The company will lose money. This kind of fuss means that everything is going as it should.
RESIDENT EVIL will be released in Japan and the USA in March 1996. It will reach Europe five months later, by the end of summer, you will have to spend more time and negotiate for a third-party company to print and sell discs – Capcom does not yet have its own European division. (Show how discs are printed)
Demand for the game will exceed supply. Not every lucky person in Japan and the USA will get the coveted disc with the game. A year later, Capcom will re-release the horror in an additional edition, a second, and the final third edition will appear in August 1998. Taking into account two re-releases, the game will not sell the measly target circulation of 200 thousand, but will reach as much as five million! She’ll even beat Shinji’s Aladdin record! (Tile publications, release dates and circulation)
The game will be a success! RESIDENT EVIL 1 is only inferior to another hit about a red animal in shorts. (Show video from Crash Bandicoot 1) And this despite the fact that other hit games like Diablo 1, Tomb Raider 1, Formula 1 and Tekken 2 will be released this year 96. The year as a whole will be successful for the industry, for example, a new Nintendo 64 console will appear and Valve will open. (Tile the games)
Capcom bosses will realize that Shinji is a gem that will bring them money. Three years later they will fork out the cash and open a separate studio for him at number 4 – so that he will have a place where to make his horror films. So Shinji reluctantly leaves from under the wing of his teacher Tokuro Fujiwara in order to become the director of a separate studio himself.
The career of failed merchandiser Shinji Mikami will continue at Capcom. Shinji’s successful horror formula will be so good that Capcom will rush to make sequels, prequels and remakes of Resident Evil. When this is not enough, they will even start making clone games of their own game. This is how Resident Evil with dinosaurs will appear. (Pause) Samurai. (Pause) And with the devils (Pause)
As for the master himself, 14 years after the success of Resident Evil 1, at the age of 45, Shinji would leave Capcom and move from Osaka to Tokyo to open his own video game development studio there (Tango Gameworks).
There are no materials preserved on what the game for the Super Nintendo looked like, but on the Internet I came across an interesting craft. A team of enthusiasts from Russia is right now remaking RESIDENT EVIL to suit the capabilities of Super Nintendo. The game promises to have an isometric view and a familiar atmosphere. Let’s wish them good luck. And I recommend that everyone who is partial to the series get acquainted with the idea.
