Resident Evil

Resident Evil, known as BIOHAZARD (バイオハザード) in Japan, is a highly successful franchise owned by Capcom that started its life as a video game created by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara released in 1996.

Resident Evil is Capcom's best-selling video game series as of 31 December 2020 having sold 107 million units.[1] The success of this franchise has spawned numerous video games, several comic book series, novelizations, a Hollywood action film series, CGI movies, stage plays, an expansive variety of merchandise and cross-over promotions with other franchises.

The franchise is primarily advertised as horror video game series with other media made to promote or relate to a specific major release or forms their own small spinoff series'. Since its debut, most of the games and certain other media installments make up a main canon universe which tells an ongoing science-fiction story where advances in the timeline are typically close to the same year in real life.

The games follow a concept known as "Bio-real" as a word given and engineered by Capcom staff that were working behind the concept phases. The primary story involves a series of accidental viral outbreaks caused by the Umbrella Corporation creating "Bio-Organic Weapons", which prompts a handful of reoccurring protagonists to venture into different careers to fight against the threat of bioterrorism. A reoccurring antagonist named Albert Wesker spurred on many important events while alive and continues to postmortem through his lasting influence on the world.

Rather than having an overarching plot, the stories of each major game installment are mostly self-contained and instead share narrative and thematic elements. The basic flow of each game involves a viral incident occurring via a newly introduced engineers virus, and the parties responsible and their motives are hinted at and eventually revealed.

Other installments and spinoff series' have followed their own shorter or self contained stories or canons.

Gameplay usually involves putting the player character in a survival scenario and incorporates simple firearm combat, navigating and finding keys to advance through maze-like areas, puzzle solving, inventory management, and rationing limited healing and ammunition items.

The typical enemies are zombies and with less common tougher BOWs. Some games have a "pursuer" type enemies that stalks the player throughout areas. Almost all the games include "File" items which are text documents that hint at how to solve puzzles or give backstory, and some form of roleplaying.