As a lot of people reading me for a while might know, I’m a huge fan of Resident Evil. And if you’ve been around the gaming internet since the early 00s, you’ve probably used the GameFAQs for the guides and walkthroughs. If you were looking at Resident Evil and RE-related guides and walkthroughs on that site back in the day you would undoubtedly stumble upon fantastic ones by one “cvxfreak”. So when I’ve learned that Alex Aniel (real name of the author) was now living in Japan and interviewing a lot of Resident Evil series developers for a book about the history of the franchise, I got quite intrigued. After several years of teasers and successful crowdfunding campaign on Unbound the book came out half a year ago. Finally, partially “thanks” to Russian terrorist missile strikes and blackouts they caused, I’ve had some time to read the book. It’s neat!
The book goes through the history of the series, starting from how Capcom got around to doing it and ending after the release of RE4 port on PS2 and includes a lot of curious behind the scenes facts. It’s based on interviews, both publicly available ones from other sources, neatly organized for the book, and the ones Alex had a chance to conduct himself. The book follows every release in the franchise during that period, including the sub-series like Survivor and Outbreak and re-releases and ports like Resident Evil: Director’s Cut or the Saturn and DS ports of RE1. And it covers all of that in a very simple way designed to be easily digestible by those who were only mildly curious in the subject and at some point played these games, and those who played them a lot, quickly recapping the events, memorable moments and other things that can refresh the reader’s memory, before going into more obscure details. Though, it never lingers on those either, preferring to be concise and often focusing more on what the developers themselves experienced during the development of the title.
And if you’re a super duper RE nerd who replays the classics regularly and read up a lot about the development of the titles… Basically, if you’re like me is what I’m saying. Well, then really there’s almost nothing new for you in this book. There are even some elements or cancelled ideas that were mentioned in passing in some interviews previously that are absent from the book, possibly specifically because developers themselves haven’t found them notable enough to mention them. Yet, even I found the read entertaining and fun. And if you’re not like me (you probably are), you will find a lot of fun facts and cool behind the scenes stories here. So, if you’re a fan of the series, especially the classics, and want to hear more about the way these titles were made, definitely give this book a go.