“The idea was to keep numbered games on Sony and use different names for games made for Sega and Nintendo,” Okamoto explained to me in summer 2017. The reason for going with a subtitle rather than a number essentially came down to console war politics. Resident Evil CODE: Veronica was not “Resident Evil 3” in name, but Capcom’s intention was for it to be a proper continuation of the storyline of Resident Evil 2. The Dreamcast launched in Japan in November 1998, ultimately giving it a 15-month head start.
The company wanted to release a spinoff title during the interim transition from PlayStation to PlayStation 2.”Ĭapcom had always been platform agnostic, and the Dreamcast looked to have at least a year to itself before the PlayStation 2 could arrive. “Capcom couldn’t afford to wait for PlayStation 2 to launch. Interested in continuing Capcom’s long-term partnership with Sega, Okamoto greenlit Resident Evil CODE: Veronica for the Dreamcast, both as an apology to Saturn consumers for canceling Resident Evil 2 and as a means to bolster support for the system. Yoshiki Okamoto, the general manager of Capcom at the time, learned that Sega was underway with a more powerful, 3D-focused successor, which was revealed in August 1998 as the Dreamcast. While Capcom released a port of the original Resident Evil for Saturn in July 1997 and planned for a port of its sequel sometime in 1998, ultimately Capcom was unable to port Resident Evil 2 to Saturn in a satisfactory way. While Sega competed against the PlayStation with its Sega Saturn, ultimately it experienced nowhere near the same level of success as its competitors, while developers complained of the difficulty in developing for the Saturn’s architecture and its relative lack of power. As a result, I decided to make ‘Resident Evil 3’ for PlayStation 2.” The PlayStation 2 was initially meant to launch in 1999 before Sony ultimately settled on its March 2000 release in Japan, over two years after the release of Resident Evil 2.Īnother project greenlit around this time was Resident Evil CODE: Veronica. “My vision for the next game was to make something brand new and more provoking. “I think Resident Evil 2 represents everything I would be able to achieve for a Survival Horror game on PlayStation,” Kamiya explained. Capcom allowed Kamiya to direct the project on his terms, and his ambitions reached far and wide - specifically, he felt that the PlayStation could not offer the technology necessary to realize his vision. The first was “Resident Evil 3,” to be directed by Hideki Kamiya following his successful result with Resident Evil 2. Each project would serve a specific purpose. Resident Evil 3 remake screenshot Capcom A Resident Evil for everybodyįollowing the sky-high success of Resident Evil 2, Capcom decided to capitalize on its momentum by greenlighting a number of projects related to the franchise. Capcom may have gone into the 1990s with Street Fighter at the forefront, but the company was going to end the decade with Resident Evil as its premier brand. Capcom quickly greenlit a Resident Evil 2 under the direction of Hideki Kamiya, and while that game spent nearly two years in development and experienced a complete reset partway through production, the sequel, released in January 1998, was even more successful than its predecessor. The industry kept moving forward in the meantime Sony entered the fray in 1994 with the 32-bit PlayStation, while at the same time Sega replaced the Genesis with the Saturn, contributing to a shift in tastes and a growing preference for polygonal 3D games.Įxperiencing a gradual wind down in the profitability of its 2D fighting games, Capcom entered financially hard times in the mid-1990s, only to be buoyed by the unexpected critical and commercial success of the original March 1996 Survival Horror title, Resident Evil, directed by Shinji Mikami. For arcades and home consoles, Street Fighter 2 became both a hit for Capcom and a cultural phenomenon, which alongside a number of other games gave the company a strong identity as a fighting game developer. On the home console front, the era began with Sega and Nintendo’s 16-bit 2D systems, while arcades continued to flourish in Japan and the U.S. For video game companies, the 1990s was a decade of constant change and evolution.
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