By Back when Resident Evil 1 was being built, a faction of the team argued so hard for slick combat flourishes—sidesteps, super-powered swings—that director Shinji Mikami finally let them cobble together a prototype. Mercifully, the moment Chris Redfield sprinted up to a zombie like a linebacker, everyone realized the slapstick monster failed the scare exam.
The anecdote arrives from Hideki Kamiya—planner on the original Resident Evil, helmsman of Resident Evil 2, and co-founder of PlatinumGames. In a chain of machine-translated posts (courtesy of Automaton), Kamiya outlined how Mikami’s horror-only design brief collided with dev requests for action tricks.
“On Biohazard 1, people kept yelling, ‘We need a sidestep!’ or ‘Let me store a powered-up knife stab!’,” Kamiya recalled. “Mikami-san was doubtful, yet okayed the experiment.
“Once the super-slash shipped in, zombies stopped being frightening… Mikami-san: ‘Told you.’ …So we axed it and filed it under ‘expensive lesson.’”
Kamiya adds that Mikami kept hammering the mantra “the game must revolve around dread,” which is why the retreat animation is clunky and exhausting on purpose. The team slowed the backpedal “to sell sheer terror,” turning limited mobility into another scare tool.
“That knife overload—watching Chris raise the blade, revving ‘GyuUUUUU!’, then unleashing the ‘ZUBAA!’—obliterated the mood and cracked us up,” Kamiya laughed. “I wound up enjoying zombie hunting so much I thought, ‘This is hopeless.. lol’.”
For the record, Kamiya insists, “I’m innocent—wasn’t the one begging for the dodge or charged slash,” a disclaimer that always earns a grin.
Even more outrageous, Kamiya reveals there was a phase where “Chris would stomp around lugging a Western broadsword, confident he would cleave undead,” but sanity prevailed because “it came off too heroic.”
Yet the franchise eventually steered into pure action with Resident Evil 4—coincidentally also under Mikami’s watch. Meanwhile, the conceptual RE4 that Kamiya shepherded mutated into Devil May Cry. That sword-swinging Chris picture stayed stuck in Kamiya’s head for years; when he started his own take on Bio 4 (later DMC) he declared, “Forget terror—let’s push action to the max,” and the very first call was “give him a sword… I remember fist-pumping, ‘At last—the blade!’”
While Resident Evil 4 is still lauded as a top-tier action-horror hybrid, I’m relieved Capcom has since pivoted back to straight-up fright fests, most horrifyingly via Resident Evil 7. RE8 had a brief action-horror fling, yet Resident Evil 9 appears flat-out terrifying again, with RE7 director Koshi Nakanishi steering the ship.
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