Friday, March 8, 2019

The 15-year hunt for Resident Evil 1.5

It's 6th November 1996. Robson & Jerome are top of the UK's pop charts, Die Hard Trilogy is about to be released on the PlayStation and The English Patient premieres in Los Angeles to widespread critical acclaim.

Over 5000 miles away in Osaka, Japan a Capcom employee burns some data to a disc. This kind of activity wasn't uncommon for the time. It was the '90s after all and CD-ROMs, with the capacity to hold hundreds of megabytes, were cutting edge technology. Yet this mundane act of basic admin would be the catalyst that sparked a 15-year hunt, spanning multiple continents and involving death, betrayal and large sums of money.

The data on that disc was an early build of a sequel to the hugely popular Resident Evil. It was only 40 per cent complete by this point, but had more than enough playability for it to be used as a demonstration tool. This collection of code and assets would come to be referred to by many names over the years, among them "the 40 per cent build" and "the raw build". However, for most of its shrouded existence, those who knew of it would call it Resident Evil 1.5.

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from Eurogamer.net
by March 08, 2019 at 02:01AM

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