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Crazy real-life original Resident Evil videos shows how far games have come, legends never die

Casey Baseel May 7, 2020
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Fan recreates the joy and frustration of the first steps into the survival horror franchise.

The original Resident Evil really was ahead of its time. Developed at a time where sophisticated real-time 3-D environments were still a tall task for home video game hardware, the deelopers focused the PlayStation’s polygon-pushing power almost exclusively on the character and enemy models, with the creepy mansion the game takes place in made of static CG backdrops with fixed camera angles.

From a technical standpoint, your character is moving through an empty space with arbitrary barriers, since the structure of the mansion doesn’t exist in a polygonal sense. When everything gelled just right, the effect was highly cinematic, but when they didn’t, things could get pretty weird. How weird? As weird as this video from Japanese Twitter user @Matsu_Kusarine.

▼ “A scene from the first Resident Evil, where you’re trying to get up on a stepstool.”

https://twitter.com/Matsu_Kusarine/status/1256852530845216768

@Matsu_Kusarine makes his entrance running against his wall at an oblique angle, a common way of getting around in the original Resident Evil when you can’t quite tell which directions you can and can’t move in, or simply can’t be bothered to rotate your heading using the game’s pre-analog stick tank-style controls.

Also immediately familiar to old-school gamers: The frustration of the rare occasions where there was polygonal piece of furniture or other object to interact with, but requiring you to be in just the right spot to do so, something easier said than done with a disorienting perspective and stiff, restrictive movements of the heroes, resulting in stuttering spasms as the game can’t decide whether to let you keep running, force you to walk, or start shouldering the item out of the way. @Matsu_Kusarine even recreates what happens when you just start hammering the controller’s use/examine button to try to get on the stepladder, only for it to make you interact with something entirely different.

This isn’t the only old-school aspect of the game that @Matsu_Kusarine shows would be baffling in real life. In another video, he recreates the pointlessly dramatic gesturing that accompanied just about every conversation in the game.

https://twitter.com/Matsu_Kusarine/status/1257570962981089280

Of course, another part of the original Resident Evil’s legacy is terrible voice acting, so another Twitter user added some doubly appropriate hammy readings to this chat about a sandwich.

https://twitter.com/MkyFor/status/1257619037007130625

With over three million views each, @Matsu_Kusarine’s videos are a reminder that no matter how sophisticated video gaming technology gets, the classics will always have their own special charm.

Source: Twitter/@Matsu_Kusarine
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