Here’s a landmark survival horror romp on the PlayStation. This thing launched in 1996 and had idiots the world over screaming in terror. Huzzah!

Resident Evil on the PlayStation

From Japanese developer Capcom, the project began in 1993. Game designer Koji Oda was working on a SNES title, but decided to switch the game to Sony’s PlayStation.

When it launched in 1996, it was an immediate sensation. A “mature” video game for adults (although we were 12 and played it later in 1997 anyway) with horror, gore, and movie-esque experiences.

The opening to Resident Evil is pretty iconic. Bad video game voice acting or not, it’s a classic first 30 minutes or so.

Unusually, Capcom hired a bunch of American actors and filmed the live action scenes in Japan. And used the English language.

The Japanese release of Resident Evil had no Japanese voice overs, just subtitles. Perhaps a nod to Hollywood horror films and all that.

But this does explain why the voice acting is so hilariously bad in the first Resident Evil.

As Capcom’s staff members were all Japanese, they didn’t handle the English localisation very well. The game had a full re-dub for its 2002 remake (more on that below).

Yes, you’re in a big old mansion. And you’re trapped there with a bunch of people who struggle to string coherent sentences together. The horror!

The basic plot is to find your comrades in this spooky mansion, avoiding zombies, lunatic dogs, and other gubbins.

Back in the day, just coming across one of the zombies was a scary experience. We had to gee ourselves up in prep to take the buggers on.

That includes this one famous jump scare moment. Dogs through a window!

All good fun, eh? Although still reasonably enjoyable, Resident Evil has since aged rather poorly. The likes of Resident Evil 4 pack far more punch.

But that’s not to diss the original Resident Evil out. It was a revolutionary game, introducing something pretty radical to the gaming world.

And that’s why we honour it today, a few hours after Halloween trundled to and end here in England.

Zombies? You betcha. There’ll be lots of hungover Brits out there today groaning, mumbling, and stumbling about the place.

Remakes of Resident Evil

The Resident Evil series is prone to remakes, a signal of the enduring popularity of the games. And the original is no exception.

It’s had the full works, revamped to make it look better and all that. One of the first was on Nintendo’s GameCube in 2002, only six years after the original!

That’s how quickly technology moved on in the industry from the original PlayStation to the early Noughties.

An HD version of the remake went and launched in 2015, too, across most consoles and PC. So, you can still play the original all you want. If that’s your thing!