Sitting down to play the remake last week, I was struck by how familiar, yet very much different, it was. I've played almost all of them, but none have had the impact of RE2, either as games or as life-altering experiences. Since then there have been more than a dozen other Resident Evil games, including a few updated versions of the 1996 original. That was the beginning of my long professional relationship with video games and technology, which eventually led me here. Within six months, I had parlayed that article into an editorial job at now-defunct video game and pop culture website UGO.com. I was so impressed by both the game and the PlayStation hardware, that I wrote about it on my very early dial-up era personal website. So I marched right over from NYC's East Village to the long-gone Gamestop store on Astor Place, plunked my money on the counter, and asked for a PlayStation and a copy of Resident Evil 2. It was something I never knew I wanted, but now had to have. This game seemed like an interactive version of one of those. But, throughout high school and college I had been a big fan of George Romero's socially conscious horror films of the '60s, '70s and '80s. At the time, it was revelatory.Īside from a few PC games on my ancient 1990s laptop, I hadn't played many video games since NHL '94 on the Sega Genesis, or owned a console since the original NES. Note that this was not the now-famous live-action commercial directed by zombie film auteur George Romero (which never aired in the US), but a choppier pastiche of gameplay and footage of cheap-looking Halloween store zombies. After stints as a commercial radio DJ and at a short-lived glossy lifestyle magazine, I ended up as a lowly assistant editor at a trade magazine (a very niche publication for a specific industry) called Beverage World. Way back in a crazy time we called the late '90s, I was not writing (or even thinking much) about technology. It's not an exaggeration to say that I owe nearly my entire career (at least the post-1998 parts of it) to the original version of Resident Evil 2. I've been waiting for the just-released remake/re-imagining more so than any other 2019 video game for one very simple reason. With amazing (for the time) cinematic prerendered intro scenes, a mix of puzzles, exploration and action, and some genuine jump scares, it became a critical and commercial hit, despite predating our current era of zombie-filled apocalyptic chic by many years.

One such case from the interactive entertainment category is Resident Evil 2, a 1998 Japanese import for the original PlayStation console.

For every Bride of Frankenstein or The Godfather Part II, there are a thousand Ghostbusters 2 or The Matrix Reloaded examples. It's rare that a sequel surpasses the original.

Resident evil 2