Not quite content with existing on nearly every platform under the sun, Capcom is finally bringing Resident Evil 4 to virtual reality later this year. There’s not long to wait until we can fight the likes of El Gigante, the Village Chieftain, and more in VR, when Capcom’s incredible action game makes the jump to VR next month.

When you step into the formidable shoes of Leon S. Kennedy in VR, you’ll have two movement options: teleportation, and room-scale. However, you can still move with the analog stick if that’s your preference, so port developer Armature Studio is really pulling out all the stops with options for the player.

What’s more, individual items like weapons and ammo have been re-engineered to act as physical objects in the environment, so while playing with touch controls you can pick them up. You can also change weapons and items by literally grabbing them off your body, like Leon’s a massive walking arsenal with sniper rifles and shotguns strapped to his body.

If it feels like Resident Evil 4 has been around forever, that’s because it has been around since 2005. It’s nonetheless wonderful that Capcom’s classic action-horror blend is making its way to a new form of media at last though, after being present through countless console and player generations alike, even if it is restricted to existing as an exclusive for the Oculus Quest 2.

From earlier this year, check out our extensive Resident Evil 4 retrospective from Edge magazine for a stellar read.

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The modding project to upgrade Resident Evil 4 Separate Ways to HD is making impressive progress, and the makers have provided players with an update on their work. Releasing on YouTube, there is now a two-hour video showing off the game’s first three chapters. If you want to get comfy and see what this looks like fully restored, here is a video of the playthrough:

The HD upgrade for Separate Ways is not complete yet, but the maker says he is hopeful that it might be finished by the of this year. Albert Marin (opens in new tab) told fans that “the project has no exact release date yet (probably by the end of this year), so we can work with no psychological pressure. Thanks for the understanding!”

This is update is not happening in a vacuum either. It’s part of a long-running collaboration between talented fans to upgrade Resident Evil 4 to HD. Their progress has been chronicled at Re4hd.com. In response to worries that this project could be shut down by Capcom, the site states: “Capcom is aware of the project and has allowed the project thread to be pinned on the Steam discussion forum for the game.”

Separate Ways is an interesting addition to the core Resident Evil 4 experience. The add-on is present in every version of the game post-GameCube and opens up after the player completes the main campaign. Players take up the role of Ada Wong and play the story of Resident Evil 4 from her perspective. It’s a pretty significant add-on, with a general run time of 4-6 hours.

It’s worth keeping in mind that this is not Assignment: Ada, which initially launched with Resident Evil 4. That was a much shorter experience that is now considered non-canon in the Resident Evil universe.

Either way, the work being done here is impressive, and for a modding project, it’s been a long process of getting the game to where it is now. The fact that these side-missions are coming together should be an exciting time for anyone who is a Resident Evil completionist.

If you are looking for more classic games to play on your PC, why not look at our guide to the Best PC Classics.

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Three, four, five plays later this exhilarating fusion of scripting and player-prompted mayhem still has the capacity to unsettle, from a glimpse of the immolated corpse of the policeman who drove you here to that first yelp of “un forastero”, through to the insistent revving of a chainsaw motor to the pealing bells that cause los ganados to (quite literally) down tools and trudge off to their place of worship. And then, of course, that wonderfully absurd wisecrack – “Where’s everyone going? Bingo?” – invites you at last to take a breath. Such is the intensity of the ordeal that it’s a shock to discover that it’s only about five minutes of game time. It feels like a landmark moment, and it is. So why, then, given the advancements in technology and game design since, have we seen nothing to match it?

Often copied, but impossible to repeat

The legacy of Shinji Mikami’s opus is reported as a simple matter of fact. Its status as a game of magnitude and influence is never really questioned, but in truth it’s not quite the pioneer it’s often made out to be. Which isn’t to say it hasn’t had an impact: its over-the-shoulder camera was imitated by a number of thirdperson shooters during the following console generation, with Dead Space in particular owing Capcom a fairly substantial debt. But it was most vocally acknowledged by Cliff Bleszinski during development of Gears Of War, and it was Epic’s game that would go on to become the established genre template. 

While the two games share a similar perspective, their approach to combat is markedly different. In Resident Evil 4 you’re rarely given the luxury of hunkering down behind conveniently placed waist-high barriers; rather, you’re expected to either provide your own cover or fire from an exposed position, planting your feet to commit to every shot, rather than cowering and sporadically popping up to let off a few rounds before roadie-running to the next position of relative safety. Rarely are you left feeling quite as vulnerable as Mikami insists you should be – even when Leon S. Kennedy hoiks a rocket launcher onto his shoulder and takes aim.

Play it again now and it takes some time to reacclimatise; we’re accustomed to being able to move and fire simultaneously these days, after all. Resident Evil 4’s controls were described as a step forward for the series but, in actuality, little had changed beyond the camera. Leon still moves like a tank, turning on the spot and only stepping forward when you nudge the analogue stick upward. Raising your weapon, meanwhile, gives you no choice but to literally stand your ground, ensuring you’ve created enough space between you and the enemy to sit through those elaborate (and heart-stoppingly tense) reload animations. 

If it seems to throw out much of what people loved about its predecessors, its combat still creates a similar sense of throat-tightening claustrophobia. You may find yourself in more open environments than before, but your field of vision – and thus your aim – is still limited. It’s an approach modern players, accustomed to greater freedoms in control, will often react angrily against – tellingly, the letterbox presentation and narrow FOV of Mikami’s The Evil Within, designed to evoke a similarly oppressive ambiance, was divisive enough to prompt calls for a border-free option, subsequently patched in by Bethesda.  

The style is the substance

This isn’t simply a case of changing tastes or emerging trends in game design, however. It’s also a matter of thematic differences. Mainstream audiences have a greater appetite for realism, which now extends to fantasy: the success of Game Of Thrones, for example, says much about our desire for any piece of fiction that dabbles in the supernatural or otherworldly to somehow reflect real-world concerns. 

Pulpy pop entertainment like Resident Evil 4 is no longer appreciated by the world’s tastemakers, while the horror genre has changed, too – irrevocably influenced by the rise of found-footage and torture porn that’s since generated a very different brand of shocker. In the current climate, something as campy and silly as this is the kind of passé that has financiers sweating. 

All of which would matter little if it was still commercially viable. But part of the reason Resident Evil 4 occupies a unique place in the medium’s history is it’s now financially prohibitive to make a 20-hour singleplayer game with so many bespoke elements. During the sixth console generation, Capcom was in a position where it could not only indulge Mikami’s wishes to incorporate hundreds of individual assets and systems in a campaign of unrivalled pacing and variety, but also scrap two years of development on a very different version of the game to facilitate this new vision. Now, the market has no place for such whims. 

Complete guide

Charting the complete history of the Resident Evil games – from the evolution of the mainline games to the weird and wonderful spin-offs

The rise of the open-world game is a testament not just to player perception of value but to publisher perception of efficiency: if sandbox games often bear the hallmarks of copy-pasting, that’s because procedural design and other contemporary techniques allow developers to fill larger spaces with repurposed content. If a core mechanic is satisfying enough, most players will be happy to deal with it being repeated ad infinitum. 

While these games invite us to embrace the comfort and familiarity of routine, the beauty of Resident Evil 4 is that it never once allows you to. Sniping sequences segue into puzzle interludes, with the briefest of lulls before a blistering siege or a boss battle. Not all of these are made equal, but each is unique: the first three alone see you harpooning a serpent on a murky lake, ducking the powerful attacks of a towering brute, and tackling an agile mutant that hangs from the rafters of a burning barn. 

It’s hard to think of a single game released since that so often seeks to shift its tempo, to surprise the player with something new and exciting, whether it’s a terrifying, rasping wheeze heralding the imminent arrival of a creature that can only be conquered with the help of thermal vision, or one-off shocks like the sudden lunge of the enemy affectionately known as Oven Man. 

Too weird to live again, too rare to ever die 

Even during its less celebrated sequences, it belligerently refuses to let its players settle, exemplified in the moment a headshot fails to halt an advancing villager, instead prompting the emergence of a writhing parasite from his neck. It’s a startling subversion of a series staple; that aiming for the skull is an essential way to conserve ammo. Here, you’re never in quite such short supply, though more daring players can save time and rounds by targeting limbs, leaving enemies vulnerable to a kick or suplex – though kneecapping a cultist is a challenge when he’s clutching a wooden shield. You might prefer to stick with one or two favourites from a varied arsenal, but the encounter design will regularly force you to refresh your tactics.

Capcom itself has tried in vain to recapture the magic. President’s daughter Ashley proved not to be the hindrance many had feared; when she isn’t a resourceful ally, she’s smart enough to get out of harm’s way by hiding in a dumpster. By contrast, Resident Evil 5’s Sheva Alomar can’t help but frequently step into partner Chris Redfield’s line of sight, or blunder into the arms of an infected opponent. Resident Evil 6 brought back Leon, but limited his role in a campaign that suggested Capcom had only handed a third of it to its quality assurance department. Spinoff Umbrella Corps, meanwhile, suggests the publisher simply doesn’t understand what made the village so iconic, repurposing it as a map in a generic online shooter.

Our expectations may be unfair. As time passes, it increasingly feels as if Resident Evil 4 might’ve been bottled lightning: a perfect confluence of timing and talent never to be recreated. A director at the peak of his creative powers, helming a team with meaningful design experience and genre expertise. A publisher in a position to take risks and spend big on experiments with existing formulae. A playerbase willing to embrace a linear game that offers enough space for them to improvise. Maybe this wasn’t actually everything games could be, but everything games were, and could never be again. At that time, few could’ve foreseen that the end of the PS2 era would represent the beginning of an era of western dominance; that Japan’s status as the gaming superpower would soon be over.  

Perhaps, then, this wasn’t the shape of things to come so much as the final flourish at the end of an era: a game that said “top that!” in the knowledge no one else had the competence nor the resources to do so. And part of what makes Resident Evil 4 so exciting to this day is the knowledge no one has quite been able to follow in its footsteps. You can see something of its playfulness, its intricacies, and its hunter/hunted dynamic in the work of FromSoftware, but the likes of Bloodborne and Dark Souls are ultimately very different games in tone and tenor. So many years on, maybe it’s time to come to terms with the fact that we might never see anything quite like Resident Evil 4 again. But that’s OK. We still have Resident Evil 4. 

This feature first appeared in Edge magazine. For more like it, subscribe to Edge (opens in new tab) and get the magazine delivered straight to your door or to a digital device.

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According to a report from VGC (opens in new tab), the team that handles core Resident Evil and Devil May Cry games, Capcom Division 1, has now been tapped to handle the bulk of the Resident Evil 4 Remake. Prior reports indicated that M-Two, a relatively new studio led by former Platinum Games CEO Tatsuya Minami, was put in charge of the remake after its contributions to the Resident Evil 3 Remake. However, sources say M-Two has had its role on the game “significantly reduced” following its most recent project review, primarily because Capcom wants to take the remake in a different direction.

M-Two was reportedly approaching the remake as a near shot-for-shot recreation with very little deviation from the original. However, Capcom is said to be pushing for a less restricted approach that gives the Resident Evil 4 Remake room to incorporate new features and ideas not present in Resident Evil 4 itself, hence the internal handoff. Sources stressed that this sort of creative shift is not unusual for Capcom, and countless other games have changed directions mid-development before, but this sort of internal reboot could push the game out of 2022, long believed to be its target release window. 

The key takeaways here are: the Resident Evil 4 Remake never had an official release date but it may now be coming later than initially expected, and it may also be more off-script than traditional remakes. This is all coming from a reliable source, but it should be treated as unofficial until Capcom addresses the Resident Evil 4 Remake on the record. We’ve reached out to the publisher for clarification and will update our reporting if we hear back. 

In official Resident Evil news, the new Resident Evil Maiden demo has left us thirsty for the full game coming this May.

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The humble save point is an endangered species in this day and age. Modern games, not wanting to interrupt or burden players with a need to remember to slide a digital bookmark into their progress, either save your game automatically or let you save whenever you please. The little glowing ports in a storm, where no enemy will attack you, where you can catch a breath before a boss, or you can make some badly needed progress are eternally memorable if done right. These ten are the best and strangest in PlayStation history.

Dead Rising 2

Even in zombie infest Las Vegas, the bathroom is a safe space to collect your thoughts, to mark a moment in time to return to again and again, to consider: how many times have I duct-taped a baseball bat and a weed-whacker together now? Dead Rising 2’s lavatory save points are not only more convenient than the lonely security office couch Frank West had to use in original, they’re also apparently magical, hiding secret shortcuts within. 

Alien: Isolation

Beeping sounds are not comforting in the world of Alien. If you hear an insistent electronic tone, it’s usually coming from a motion tracker indicating precisely close you are to having your face eaten by a hulking two-mouthed bug monster. In Alien: Isolation, though, beeping can also indicate the presence of a blessed save point, a taupe colored electrical panel that represents a few more minutes of survival. Only problem: it seems to take a billion years for for Isolation’s save stations to register Ripley’s key card. Not that there’s any hurry because of face eating bug monsters.

Metal Gear Solid

Snake’s Codec is not a comforting piece of technology. Is it convenient to have a communication device that interacts directly with your ear’s delicate bones? Sure but what if it malfunctions! That’s stressful. It’s also not particularly convenient to have to use it to call a separate person just to save your game. Sure, Mei Ling is a personable and intelligent individual always willing to cough up some philosophical bonmot to ease the pain of extreme espionage, but isn’t there a better way to mark your time at Shadow Moses? Apparently not, because that’s how you have to save there.

Resident Evil

The Umbrella corporation’s boundless capacity for horrifying technological advancement is matched only by its adoration of technological anachronism. If you can build massive, secret underground base’s for developing futuristic, biological military ordinance, why do you need typewriters to save everyone’s progress? They’re not even electric typewriters! You need old fashioned, messy ass ink ribbons to use them. There will be hell to pay if that ink gets all over the jewels and bizarre keys in this inventory full of stuff needed to get through Umbrellas various mansions. At least the music playing in every save room near the typewriters is beautiful.

God of War 3

Kratos is not the kind of guy you’d expect to regularly genuflect. Indeed Kratos’ whole thing is hating gods, killing gods, and yelling about how he’s going to kill all those gods he hates so much. And yet every time he wants to save his progress during some gluttonous revenge rampage, he steps into an altar, gifts from Zeus’ daughter Athena  in God Of War III. Zeus himself is the one who granted the Spartan his progress-stashing ability in the first game. I’m not calling you a sellout or anything Kratos, but if you were for real you wouldn’t need to save your game at all! Just kidding. Your new Viking beard frightens me.

GTA: Vice City

Over the past decade, saving your game in Grand Theft Auto has always been a homey experience. Returning to your base of operations is part of it, but it’s all about where you rest your head permanently. Niko Bellic’s apartments, Michael de Santa’s house of Hollywood strife, etc. Back in Grand Theft Auto Vice City, though,  Tommy Vercetti saved his progress in a seedier, more transient locale. The Ocean View Hotel, with its gaudily decorated bed and a floating cassette icon, is where he needed to save his game. It is simultaneously the least comfortable and the most in GTA history. No one likes to live in a hotel, but at least you can trash the place and someone else will clean it up.

No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise

Old Chuck Greene saves his game in the bathroom, but we don’t know that he’s actively relieving himself in there. Guy could just be washing his hands. Tucking his shirt back in. Wiping off a bloodstain or something. Travis Touchdown in No More Heroes? There are no illusions about what this assassin nerd is doing when he saves his game. He walks right into his WC, drops trou, and goes to town to mark down precisely where he is on his journey to becoming the number one hired killer with a lightsaber. It’s ridiculous but I have to admit that I admire his comfort level. You do you, Travis.

Dead Space

When you’ve been trundling through the darkened halls of a crumbling space station infested by monsters made up of the ripped up limbs of the terrible warped crew that used to live there, a little light goes a long way. The welcoming glow of a USG Ishimura save terminal goes the longest in Dead Space. Warm, reassuring and a temporary salvation from all that getting your brains sucked out through your eye socket by some gasping monstrosity. That said it doesn’t quite make sense that there are terminals everywhere for the crew to just randomly record their thoughts on. Is the Ishimura like a giant sci-fi episode of the Real World with confessionals everywhere? Weird, Dead Space. Weird.

Ico

So this creepy, vaguely medieval society is terrified of boys born with horns, right? So they lock them up in a rotting castle ruled over by some inky witch with blue electric magic powers and a legion of living shadows at her command. If everyone doesn’t want the boy to escape with the ghostly magical young girl he just met in the castle, why are there inexplicably comfortable couches all over the place for the two of them to take naps on, thus saving their game? One second, you’re in a crumbling hallway of death. The next, you’re on a windswept terrace with a couch ready for popcorn and binge watching John Hughes movies. This castle and its save points make no sense, Ico.

Tomb Raider (1996)

We’re not saying Lara Croft doesn’t run a high probability of finding precious jewels during her grave robbing adventures in the original Tomb Raider. In fact, it’s all but guaranteed that at some point after she’s shot a T-rex in the face and solved the instant death puzzles of an evil statue with the midas touch, Lara’s going to find some shiny, valuable rocks. But why do all the jewels in Tomb Raider let her save her game? And why are there only a few of them inexplicably scattered around the tombs all over the world? MAGIC JEWELS DON’T SAVE GAMES IN REAL LIFE, TOMB RAIDER!

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It’s a fully paid-up bit of horror-game imagery. Zero doubt about that. But does it make Gears of War a horror game? No more than coating a horse with whipped cream turns it into a sundae. From that point on, Gears of War is a big, meaty shooter, and no mistake. Neither the grotesque nature of the Locust nor the odd dalliance with slower-paced jump-scares, Wretches and old, abandoned houses (stock horror environment #2) alters that fact by one iota.

But why isn’t Gears of War a horror game? It gives us bleak environments, thick with a sense of perpetual mourning. It gives us hideous, tough, and highly dangerous monsters to fight off. It delivers gore with the giddy aplomb of a newly graduated fireman on his first day of hose-duty. It wraps all of this in a weighty, all-pervading sense of oppression. All of these things are core tenets of horror gaming. They’re certainly elements which define many easily-recognisable entries in the canon. Resident Evil 4. Dead Space. This month’s The Evil Within (opens in new tab).

So what’s the difference? Why do we say that Gears of War is a shooter, and that the others are horror games? You could argue that the largely one-note ferocity of Gears’ cover-based gameplay removes the fear factor sufficiently to earn the action-label most resoundingly. And you’d have a fairly decent point. Pretty cut-and-dried, right? Well no, I don’t think it is.

You see as a long-time horror aficionado in all media, I don’t find that a convincing argument at all. Because, after decades of immersion in horror, games, and horror-games, I think there’s something else at play, blurring the lines as fast as anyone can define them. Something endemic to horror gaming that, much like great Cthulhu, has been around so long, picking maliciously at the seams of the world, that we’ve long since stopped noticing its presence. Simply, it’s hard to define the boundaries of the horror game because very few video games have ever really delivered horror true experiences. We’ve pretended otherwise for a very long time, but really that’s the ugly truth.

Most horror games, even the really good ones, are games first and foremost, horror second. Strip away the aesthetic, and mechanically they’re just games. Some are actiony, some are stealthy, many dwell somewhere in between, but in truth they’re mostly just stock game mechanics painted with a gory or supernatural surface gloss. And real horror just isn’t like that. A good horror novel isn’t a spy story where all the enemy agents just happen to be zombies. A good horror film isn’t a generic Michael Bay movie, only set at night and full of vampires. Blade is a great, supernaturally-themed, gory action movie, but a great horror film? No.

In real horror–and this statement might sound trite upon first scan, but stick with me–the horror is the focus. In fact more than that, it’s the be-all and end-all. It’s not a tonal or aesthetic garnish for something else. It is the core of the whole experience. It’s the conduit through which all of the statements, thoughts and musings in the author’s mind are filtered in order to–as is the case with all good genre fiction–extrapolate ideas and experiences, and through their amplification, truly explore them.

And all good horror is about something. John Carpenter’s Halloween is concerned with the progressive, hypocritical isolation of suburbia in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Aliens is about Vietnam. Don’t Look Now is about the fatalistic nature of obsession and mourning. H.P. Lovecraft’s work, which beautifully straddles the line between art and pulp, is dripping with existential terror at arrogant mankind’s tiny pinhole view of reality. Same goes for the work of classic English novelist M.R. James.

But the point is that whatever subject matter or ideology is being filtered through it, the horror is the core. It’s the engine that makes the whole affair work. It’s what wraps up and forms every part of the work. But horror games don’t usually do that. They usually just stick some scary atmospherics next to a stealth, survival or action game, and leave it at that. They’re almost always primarily concerned with servicing their gameplay mechanics, with horror coming a distant second, if at all. The last time a big, mainstream release did the real horror thing was probably during the heyday of Silent Hill.

Although seen at the time as a rival to Resident Evil, in truth Silent Hill couldn’t have been further from its gore-munching genre-buddy. Furthering my points above, while both games are ostensibly third-person survival-horror games with deliberately awkward combat, squiffy, disorienting camera angles, and an emphasis on escape and evasion, it’s not their gameplay mechanics that ultimately matter, but their tones and the narrative content.

Resident Evil, even in its earlier, less action-driven entries, was a surface-level horror rollercoaster, trading on the vital thrill of jump-scares, gore, and b-movie monsters. It was, as is often the case, more focused on gameplay systems and aesthetic than deeper, true horror. Silent Hill though, at its best, has always operated in the inverse, using its gameplay to service a greater aim. The series’ high points have always been about atmosphere, emotion, psychology, and the use of horror’s nightmarish, surreal excesses to explore deeper, more powerful concepts and notions. Its monsters are no mere bitey cannon fodder. Each is designed to evoke and reflect an element of the lead character’s trauma and internal struggle. Its twisting, reality-bending journeys are crafted to disturb in specific ways that also resonate with the above.

It’s no coincidence that the series’ weaker, later entries are the ones that, with lesser or no involvement from early series Producer Akira Yamaoka, lost track of that. Neither is it any coincidence that Yamaoka’s dual role as designer and composer was instrumental in creating a coherent, cohesive, authored, ‘total horror’ production. Silent Hill is a game, but it’s one that has more in common with the legitimate conceits of literary horror than those of its corpse-grinding stablemates.

So are we now screwed for real video game horror? Are we bereft of hope and scrabbling in the dark, with Resi literally sticking to its guns, and Yamaoka seguing toward film, now working with Italian horror master Dario Argento (opens in new tab)? Well no, we’re not. Just as I was starting to give up, and ready to resign my gaming horror activities to the mental folder labelled ‘Fun diversions, but eh’–alongside Fast and Furious films and yo-yoing–a new wave of the real stuff has started to seep insidiously through the cracks in the floorboards.

P.T., with no hyperbole, is the absolute antithesis of game-horror’s failings (opens in new tab), intelligently recognising the detrimental effect of oft-applauded player agency on the power of horrific confrontations. That it also tightly winds its horror around a carefully crafted frame of psychology and significance makes it one of the finest and most insightfully directed interactive horror experiences in years.

Alien: Isolation (opens in new tab), despite being a more player-driven, stealth-horror experience, truly understands the impact and nature of its source material’s make-up. With that at its core, it fearlessly eschews all of gaming’s empowering, protagonist-courting safety nets and ‘necessary’ softened corners to create a savage, uncompromising simulation, made of primal terror and the unpredictability of real survival.

Perhaps ironically, given the arguments I’ve sketched out above, this resurgence is partly down to improved technology. Alien: Isolation just wouldn’t have been possible without the advanced, living, breathing artificial intelligence Creative Assembly created for the titular beast. P.T.’s atmospheric, claustrophobic, pure-horror focus is arguably amplified–and perhaps designed to show off–the near photorealism of Kojima Productions’ new Fox Engine.

But beyond technology, the human, creative factor remains all important. That mention of the studio behind Metal Gear resonates beyond the power of its shiny new toys. Horror like P.T. (and the in-production Silent Hills) requires the kind of deeper-thinking, more experimental auteurship that someone like Hideo Kojima–alongside collaborator Guillerno Del Toro–brings to a project. In fact his spiralling, fourth-wall-breaking, creative playground approach to direction will probably be far more at home on Yamaoka’s turf than it even was in MGS. Besides, a series as unique and artistic as Silent Hill needs a director with that sort of unchallengeable clout. Someone with vision and power, who can stand up for his ideas in the same way Yamaoka once did.

Similarly, if Isolation hadn’t been made by a team as dedicated to Alien detail as Creative Assembly–not just in terms of aesthetic, but also the tone, mood, and subtextual fears fundamental to Alien’s world and its violence–then it would merely be a beautiful sci-fi stealth game with a very dangerous monster.

So I suppose we come full circle. The future of video game horror simply cannot be about surface gloss, and gore, and overcoming the monstrous hordes. However much incoming visual fidelity affords us the ability to create more realistic dismemberment, and great numbers of the undead, we cannot allow horror to remain so external, a thing to be overcome with gameplay, weapons and agency.

To both the player and the creator, video game horror must, as it does in all other media, excel by becoming an internal experience, authored with thought, intent and craft, and experienced with personal resonance and uncomfortable meaning. I don’t want to jinx it. I don’t want to speak too soon. But it seems like technology, ambition, and (very probably) the more open creative climate brought about by the newfound prominence of indie gaming, might just be about to combine to create a bold new era. Horror fans, cross everything you have.

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Games can go through vast transformations between the time they’re conceived and released. Usually, though, the game that arrives on store shelves is more or less the one the developers sought out to make when they first came up with the idea. This Top 7 is not about those games.

Instead, we’re celebrating the titles that had more tumultuous development cycles–the ones that ended up totally different from what they started out as. We’re looking at licensed games that became AAA blockbusters, cancelled sequels that were reworked into original IPs, and cancelled original IPs that were reworked into amazing sequels. Your favorite game might’ve started off as an entirely different project, and it’s time we pull back the curtain on gaming’s forgotten history.

7. ZombiU was first Killer Freaks from Outer Space

Nintendo first unveiled the Wii U at E3 2011, showing the world its entry into the next generation of consoles. Though few titles were actually shown off, one notable exception was Killer Freaks from Outer Space, an Ubisoft-published first-person shooter about an alien invasion of Earth. Made by Ubisoft Montpellier (who originally pitched it as an FPS where players kill Rabbids–presumably because everyone, including the developers, was tired of Rabbids), the game pit human survivors against creepy, green alien monsters. And yet, one year later, Killer Freaks was nowhere to be found at Ubisoft’s booth. So what happened?

ZombiU happened, apparently. After the lukewarm reception at E3 2011, Ubisoft went back to the drawing board. The titular Killer Freaks were removed from the shooter and replaced with zombies, creating a much more serious, survival-based game. And so, the originally Rabbids-starring, then alien-starring Killer Freaks from Outer Space was mutated into one of the better, more ambitious Wii U launch titles.

6. Star Fox Adventures was Fox-less as Dinosaur Planet

From Battletoads to Banjo Kazooie, British developer Rare was responsible for some of the biggest games of the ’90s. Some of its most popular titles, though, were the ones it made with Nintendo characters–Rare was one of the very few western developers that Nintendo allowed access to its coveted roster of icons. Despite this, the GameCube release of Star Fox Adventures was not originally a Star Fox game at all–in fact, it was originally a Nintendo 64 game by the name of Dinosaur Planet that had absolutely nothing to do with Fox McCloud.

Dinosaur Planet starred Sabre, a fox that, while looking a lot like Nintendo’s Fox, was actually meant to be a totally unconnected fox. Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto met with Rare and noted the similarities between the two franchises’ characters, and suggested reaching a middle ground. It was decided that the two IPs would be smushed together, creating Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet, a GameCube game that would ultimately serve as the last one Rare would develop under Nintendo’s wing.

5. Halo was a third-person shooter and an RTS (On Mac)

Halo is to Microsoft as Mario is to Nintendo as Mickey Mouse is to Disney–that’s how it has been since Halo: Combat Evolved released on the original Xbox in 2001. The innovative shooter was immensely popular, and arguably responsible for the success of the Xbox in America, as well as the future success of the first-person shooter genre on consoles. But there was a time, only two years prior to the game’s release, when Halo was a far different game on a totally different system.

Bungie originally hitched its wagon not to Microsoft, but to Apple, and was planning on releasing Halo as a third-person shooter for the Mac. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But it’s true–you can even watch Steve Jobs introduce Bungie co-founder Jason Jones at 1999’s Macworld. And before it was a third-person shooter, Halo was even more removed from the game that dazzled Xbox owners; Bungie had originally planned for it to be a real-time strategy title (as seen in this early video).

4. Doom was conceived as a licensed Aliens game

Though Wolfenstein 3D was big, it wasn’t until id Software released Doom that the FPS had truly arrived. It was a huge hit, thanks in no small part to its incredible graphics and original, unique setting. Fighting demons on Mars? Who would’ve thought of that? What a weird, weird idea.

But it isn’t nearly as strange when you consider what Doom was before it was Doom. Early in the game’s development, id was in talks with 20th Century Fox to make a shooter based on the team’s favorite sci-fi film: Aliens. Suddenly, the concept of fighting weird creatures on a foreign planet doesn’t seem so strange–in fact, that’s literally the plot of the entire franchise. That deal eventually fell through, so Doom went back to the drawing board… and ended up being pretty much the same game, except, you know, more red.

3. Dead Space was original a System Shock sequel

Far, far away there exists an enigmatic mausoleum filled with monsters, and the only evidence of what happened is in audio logs scattered around the world. This narrative could, realistically, describe three different games: System Shock, BioShock, or Dead Space. While it’s well-established that BioShock was made as a spiritual successor to System Shock, a lesser-known fact is that Dead Space was, at one point, supposed to be an actual sequel to Looking Glass Games’ 1999 sci-fi shooter.

In 2006, EAs Redwood Shores studio was rumored to be working on System Shock 3, but after the publisher found that it couldn’t legally publish the game (they owned the name, not the development rights), the team was forced to make an original IP instead. So they went back to work and made Dead Space, a game that takes place far, far away, in an enigmatic mausoleum filled with monsters. Oh, wait.

2. Devil May Cry started off as Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil was shambling towards stagnation in the late ’90s. Though sales of it were strong, Capcom wanted to create something more original for the fourth installment of the incredibly popular franchise. So director Hideki Kamiya set out to turn RE into a stylish action game, ditching the slow, plodding pace of the previous games in favor of a new, superhuman hero. Eventually, however, it was decided that this simply didn’t fit within the RE universe. Kamiya’s action game was just too cool for Resident Evil.

But know what it was cool enough for? The mother-freaking son of Sparda. Kamiya’s team rewrote the story, taking out all of the Resident Evil ties and refocusing it in a new universe. Here, a white-haired monster killer named Dante slashed apart hordes of demons and occasionally stopped for a slice of pizza. From the ashes of Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry was born–turns out, people enjoyed the freedom that came from ditching traditional tank controls.

1. Donkey Kong was supposed to be a Popeye game

Master Chief is pretty popular. Kratos? Sure–people love that guy. And even at his worst, Sonic the Hedgehog has legions of fans. But none of these icons have anything on Mario. From his humble beginnings as “Jumpman” in Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, the plumber has billions in game sales under his belt. He’s had his own television show, his own cereal, and even his own Hollywood movie. And guess what? He almost didn’t exist.

If young game designer Shigeru Miyamoto had gotten his way, Donkey Kong would’ve been Bluto, Pauline would’ve been Olive Oyl, and Mario would’ve been Popeye. Yup, Donkey Kong–one of the most important video games ever made–was almost a licensed Popeye game. That deal fell through, and Miyamoto had to create his own characters. In other words, gaming’s greatest mascot is essentially a Popeye stand-in. There’s a happy ending to this story, though, besides the advent of an industry icon: Miyamoto was able to eventually make his Popeye game. Dreams do come true, people. Dreams do come true.

Bonus: Sleeping Dogs was Black Lotus, and then True Crime

According to the developers, Sleeping Dogs didn’t change much over the course of its lengthy development cycle, but the story behind the game is too good to ignore. Soon after developer United Front Games was formed, it began work on a new, original IP. Black Lotus, as it was called, was set in Hong Kong, and starred an undercover female cop (reportedly modeled after Lucy Liu). Activision wasn’t comfortable with spending so much on an original IP starring a woman, though, so it had the developer affix a penis onto the star and position it as True Crime: Hong Kong, a reboot of the True Crime series.

The end? Not by a long shot. Activision cancelled the game in 2011, arguing that “only top-tier games can be competitive in today’s market.” But True Cri–erm, Black Lotus wasn’t dead yet. Square Enix saw potential, and published it a year later as Sleeping Dogs. Weirdest part? United Front Games says little was modified during this flip-flopping development cycle–well, besides the hero getting a sex change, that is.

The games, they are a-changin’

There are many, many other examples of games going through crazy transformations before their launch. It’s Mr. Pants was supposed to be a Donkey Kong game, and there’s even some rumblings that 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand wasn’t originally going to star rapper 50 Cent. Crazy, right? And these are just the ones we know of; surely there are plenty of other tales that have yet to reach the light of day. One day, maybe we’ll know the truth.

And if you’re looking for more, check out top 7 cancelled games we wish we could play and the top 7 games we really hope aren’t cancelled.

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