Gaming: When Capcom Brought In A Professional Screenwriter For The Original...

In an alternate timeline, Resident Evil could've become a lot more serious.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.

Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.

From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.

Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.

Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.

Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!

While Capcom has been on a roll with the last few Resident Evils, earlier in the series' life things didn't always go so smoothly. Resident Evil 2 was rebooted about 70% of the way through its development, with the original version eventually dubbed Resident Evil 1.5. Later it would take Capcom multiple restarts to settle on a direction for the masterful Resident Evil 4. Both ended up being huge hits, but if either development story had worked out differently, it's likely both survival horror and action games would look a lot different today. I mean, imagine living in a world where Resident Evil isn't goofy as hell.

"It was all too realistic. The ominous atmosphere from the first game, as represented in things like the Spencer Mansion itself, the armor room, key items like the jewelry box and gemstones… all that had been removed," Resident Evil 2 writer Noboru Sugimura said in an interview way back in 1998, as translated by Shmuplations. There he was speaking about that canceled "1.5" version of RE2 that Capcom abandoned—when he joined the project mid-development, his first bit of advice was to rewrite it.

Source: PC Gamer