We have talked ad nauseam about the eternal refrain of ugly video game covers and there are collections that would make even the baby Jesus manger cry, but one of the ones that has been surprising me in an exaggerated way for years is the image from the western cover of Resident Evil.
ok when it was created MegaMan and its mythical cover were other times, but here we are in 1996, the game was born almost with a franchise, with the promise of a movie under its arm, and with the potential to become one of the greatest video games of all time. So… What is this?
The image of Resident Evil that looks like an AI
The character does not look like any of the protagonists in the game, the face is very strange, the weapon looks like a collage with pieces of rifles, machine guns and shotguns that form a surreal metallic monster, the background seems taken from Roscharch’s nightmare
That expression, those mosaic-like tarantulas, you can even see some dinosaur arms out there! as if suddenly Dino Crisis he would have been ahead of his time to warn us of what was to come in the world of survival horror Capcom.
Nothing to do with the original Japanese cover, much more sober but much more powerful. A song that we already know by heart since in the Kirby They decided to change the smile and sympathy of the Japanese covers for angry pink ball eyebrows as if that were going to sell more.
The truth is that if you were to show this image to anyone today without prior knowledge of the history and its origin, it is most likely that they would tell you flatly and without trembling in their voice that the western cover of the first Resident Evil it has now been made by an AI. And it would be difficult to refute, really.
The true origin of the cover
For many years there were various theories about the origin of the mythical cover. Some said that the one who appeared there was Richard Aiken, a STARS member of the first Resident Evil with a far from promising future in the franchise (despite the fact that when it came to renewing the game they gave it a little more prominence).
It is strange that a secondary of those who are there for us to see how he dies at some point carries so much weight on a cover, but in search of a logical explanation for that image we tried to find a logic where, in reality, there was absolutely nothing.
Due to the similarities with his face, although he has never openly acknowledged it, we know that the man the character is inspired by is the artist of the cover, the comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz. And what we can hold on to about the curious nature of the montage is what the artist himself recounted a few years ago.
Apparently when they commissioned the job, either the game was still in an early process or they couldn’t show him more than necessary, so they told him that it was going to be an action and shooting game with monsters and that it should include some elements on the screen like weapons or spiders. And so, from that brief summary that in broad strokes supposed the most absolute nothingness, Sienkiewicz took that image out of his sleeve, to Capcom USA he liked it, and with it one of the most emblematic legends of the franchise was born Resident Evil.
In ExtraLife | The name of Resident Evil was chosen in a contest, and it was not the only thing that was decided like this
