Resident Evil, known in Japan as biohazard (バイオハザード,Baiohazādo?) is a 2002 survival horror video game developed by Capcom. It is a remake of the 1996 video game of the same name. The game has often been colloquially referred to by developers and fans alike as "REmake" or "REbirth" to distinguish it from the original.
The game was initially released as a GameCube-exclusive title, fulfilling Shinji Mikami's commitment to making Studio 4 titles Nintendo exclusives. The remake was developed alongside Resident Evil 4, which became a Nintendo exclusive due to the unrelated Capcom Five agreement, and Studio 3's Resident Evil 0, which was also intended to be a Nintendo exclusive before development was temporarily halted in 1999.
While Mikami's support for exclusivity ended in 2005, the game was absent when the Capcom Five games were ported to the more successful PlayStation 2. The remake would only receive a single port for the (already backwards-compatible) Nintendo Wii several years later in 2009 as part of the Resident Evil Archives collection alongside Resident Evil 0.
In 2014, Capcom announced a high-definition remaster would be arriving on January 20, 2015 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam entitled "Resident Evil: HD Remaster". The game launched in Japan on November 27, 2014, for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3[1] and was an overwhelming financial success, breaking numerous digital sales records, such as becoming PlayStation Network's biggest launch game and Capcom's fastest-selling title of all time across North America and Europe.[2] By April 2015, Capcom announced that the remaster had already exceeded sales of one million copies.[3] The game was later featured in the Resident Evil Origins Collection, which would be ported to the Nintendo Switch.
As of 2023, the remaster alone has sold over 3.8 million copies, while the game has sold an overall combined total of 6.1 million, making it one of the best-selling titles in the franchise.[4] As a result of the title's success, a subsequent remaster of Resident Evil 0 was announced, as well as a remake of Resident Evil 2, the latter of which released to widespread critical and financial acclaim in early 2019.
