Resident Evil, known in Japan as Biohazard, is the series that gave survival horror its name. Capcom released the first game for the PlayStation in 1996, directed by Shinji Mikami and built on ideas carried over from the studio's 1989 Famicom title Sweet Home: a locked mansion, a small inventory, ammunition you could genuinely run out of, and fixed camera angles that decided what you were allowed to see. The tagline on that first release called it survival horror, and the phrase stuck as the label for an entire genre. Resident Evil 2 in 1998 widened the outbreak from one mansion to the whole of Raccoon City and paired its two protagonists across interlocking scenarios, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis added a pursuer that followed you between areas, and Code: Veronica took the story off the PlayStation and onto the Dreamcast. Through all of it the fiction stayed consistent: the Umbrella Corporation, viral bioweapons that escape their handlers, and a small group of survivors, chief among them Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Leon S. Kennedy, Claire Redfield and Ada Wong, who keep being sent back into the containment failures.
The series has reinvented itself twice rather than settle. Resident Evil 4 in 2005 moved the camera over the shoulder, replaced tank controls with aimed shooting and paced the game around escalating set pieces, and its influence on third-person action design reached well past horror. Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6 pushed further toward action and cooperative play, the latter splitting a global C-virus outbreak across four interwoven campaigns, before Resident Evil 7: Biohazard in 2017 dropped to a first-person view, shrank the scale back to one hostile house and returned the series to slow, resource-starved dread. Resident Evil Village continued that first-person line. Alongside the numbered entries Capcom has built a parallel catalogue of remakes, from the 2002 GameCube reimagining of the original through the ground-up Resident Evil 2, 3 and 4 remakes, plus the Revelations games, Operation Raccoon City, Umbrella Corps and a steady run of HD reissues. It is Capcom's best-selling franchise and has carried into live-action and animated films and television, but the games remain the reason people know Raccoon City. This collection gathers the Resident Evil titles we stock, from the early survival horror through the action years to the modern remakes.
