When Capcom released the first Resident Evil in March 1996, probably nobody knew what this franchise was going to become, one that 30 years later has spawned 9 mainline games, dozens of spin-offs, 13 films (counting the animated ones), 2 television series, countless books and comics… And it’s still capable of surprising fans who, more and more, get tired fast. With the release of Zach Cregger’s new adaptation hitting theaters, quite a few people have started replaying the whole saga… although, probably, ignoring the black sheep that came close to turning Resident Evil into a zombie franchise. Ready to take a walk through the darkest part of Raccoon City?
RE:Verse
The upside is that they gave it to you free with the purchase of Resident Evil: Village. The worst part… Well, everything else. Trying to bring back Mercenaries mode, this game offered a classic six-player PvP that took a year and a half to go live, and when it did it was just a cash grab, with constant monetization, on top of the fact that there wasn’t much to do there. It only lasted two years before closing its doors in June 2025. It wanted to pay tribute to the history of Resident Evil and ended up being history.
Pachisuro Biohazard
If you’ve been to Japan, you’ll have seen that they’re not immune to slot machines either. There, they’re played in places dedicated to them, pachinko parlors, packed with cigarette smoke, full of noise and flashing lights, and machines we’d never understand outside Japan. Pachinko, besides making you win and lose money, also tell stories (non-canonical ones), and Resident Evil was no exception: there are as many as 9 different machines, each one based on a game. That said, even if you play as Chris and Jill, I don’t think anyone would defend it as one of the saga’s great forgotten entries.
Resident Evil Gaiden
At Nintendo’s insistence, someone at Capcom was forced to take the golden goose and make a version for… Game Boy Color! To get around the problem and deal with the console’s graphics, the studio was forced to pull a very simple trick: make everything play from a top-down perspective, while the fights played out in first person. The plot doesn’t fit with the rest of the series, the gameplay was pretty clunky, and the experiment came and went without much fanfare: the experience was enough to know they had to focus on consoles that could handle the visuals properly.
Resident Evil Survival Unit
Nothing says Resident Evil quite like, apparently, a war in which Capcom wants to bleed you dry. Because, after half an hour of playing a game on your phone that seems to recapture the spirit of the saga’s first titles, it suddenly turns into a simple game of building your city, waging wars and, above all, paying to improve your team. You know how it goes: events that only happen for a very limited time, items you have to pay a fortune for, gameplay that has nothing to do with the saga’s… I mean, a little gem. Since it was free, it was quite a hit in its early days, but the fans, to this day, wish they could forget it. It really was hard to make the worst Resident Evil mobile game because the competition is fierce, but somehow they’ve managed it.
