Many pre-release video games have suffered the fate of being the subject of memes. Assassin’s Creed has come under fire for melting NPC faces, and many “visual relegations” have launched campaigns for all-knowing fans to talk about sleazy developers with drones. But one of the funniest things ever happened was the 10th birthday this week: Resident Evil 6symbols of.
Of course, the sign is inherently harmless. Resident Evil is a game about viruses, and its logo is designed to resemble a virus under a microscope or whatever. I get it. I saw. But on the eve of Resident Evil, people saw something completely different.
They saw a giraffe getting oral sex by a doubled figure. Now that I’ve said it, even those who didn’t finally get online in 2012 might see it. Giraffe’s BJ logo can’t be invisible, like a slutty Rorschach test.
I really miss the craziness of this time. The media reported it. Twitter and forum users couldn’t believe it. It was repainted with astonishing clarity by the delighted Sick artist, and I’m definitely not going to link or picture it here. The logo brought so much joy that at the end even Capcom quietly referenced its meme status in several now-disappeared social media posts.
This era is the era of Resident Evil, and video game development is the equivalent of someone taking so much that it causes their brain to run at a million miles per hour. Any suggestion that the series must be grounded or down-to-earth has been ejected. At this point in the mood surrounding the series, I’m still a little surprised that the series didn’t spark Dino Crisis and send zombies into space.
In that sense, the logo’s unexpected hilarity seems to match exactly where the series is at the time — often unintentionally funny and misunderstood, chaotic and chaotic albeit on a fair path. Kind of crap.
Thinking of Resident Evil 6’s logo and tenth anniversary, we also noticed something else: how brave and clever Capcom has chosen to moderate things and go back to Resident Evil 7’s basics.
Gaming companies rarely actually see the iceberg coming in this situation. While it didn’t quite live up to Capcom’s expectations, in terms of sales, Resident Evil 6 ended up being as successful as Resident Evil 5 — selling over 8 million copies. Whatever Capcom’s expectations were, it became one of the two best-selling Resident Evil games to date at the time, and was in Capcom’s top 5 games of all time. The easy thing to do is do another one, but polish it a bit more, avoid embarrassing logos, and pay high marketing dollars to be satirized by Conan O’Brien as a super camp.
Yet even as Capcom brazenly winked at the giraffe meme in a social media post, it sensed the change in mood and adjusted. The coming iceberg — people tired of rolling against walls, stupid, not-so-scary Resident Evil — is guided by style and substance. The collection offers something fresh. Ten years on, it’s hard to think of the decisions made after RE6 for the next race as genius.
That thinking paid off. The relatively down-to-earth Resident Evil 7 sold 11 million copies. The similarly pared-down Resident Evil 2 remake is approaching 10 million; and those bombastic RE titles are now at No. 6 and No. 7 on Capcom’s all-time bestseller list. The shift has worked, and Resident Evil’s health is arguably better than ever. And, so far, none of the signs look like sex. Maybe RE9 will play a role in this – hopefully.
