Resident Evil Survivor

“I Was Only Listening to It Because I’m So Bored!”

“I know you think that I’m a murderer.
But you’re wrong!”
North American PS1 release front cover.

I’ve got a confession to make: I love the Resident Evil franchise. I adore pretty much everything about it, as well as most every piece of media and ephemera that’s been borne of it. The core entries in the game series? Pretty much all masterpieces in my mind — even the so-called “worst” one.** The Milla Jovivich run of live-action movies? Love each and every last schlock installment to death. The closed-down theme restaurant in Japan’s Shibuya district? I hear the “S.T.A.R.S. Original Noodles à la Barry” were to die for. Funnily enough, the one aspect I could honestly take or leave are the prevalent members of the cannibalistic undead militia themselves: I’ve never much been one for zombie media, truth be told — especially over the course of the past decade, where they’ve been run back into the ground they once rose from. And yet, Resident Evil manages to overcome this personal hurdle for me, by the sheer force of its earnest charms and compelling gameplay. Perhaps this predilection of mine makes me an outlier in the larger fandom? Or maybe it’s come to be a common sentiment at this point — a shared zombie fatigue that we collectively manage to look past.

Now, if there’s one “hot take” on the Resident Evil franchise that likely sets me furthest apart from the rest of the Resi community – an aspect of it which seems to be its most contentious, but which I’ve always gone to bat for nonetheless – it’d be this: The light gun titles deserve more love. There’s no accounting for taste, I know; but if video games ended around the time of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles’ release, I’d at least be content knowing that the industry ended on a high note. Of course, the pair of excellent rail shooters originally released for Nintendo’s Wii were actually not the first in Capcom’s first-person zombie-shooting endeavors. To chronicle the origins of the Chronicles games, we need to travel back seven years in time — back to the fifth-generation console that first birthed the survival horror series. It’s there where you’ll find Resident Evil Survivor (known as ‘Biohazard Gun Survivor’ in Japan), serving as the franchise’s very first spin-off title. And for whatever reason, the fandom has taken to dismissing it as apocrypha in the two decades since — writing it off as some sort of major misstep or low point in the larger series’ history. And while there have certainly been worse Resident Evil games in the twenty years since (Yeah, I’ll admit it: There are, in fact, a couple stinkers), Survivor still seems to serve as the sort of go-to punching bag, for some reason? Which I reckon means it’s my contractual duty to stick up for it, then!

In this spooktacular side story on the Bad Game Hall of Fame (I originally wrote the word “spooktacular” here with intent to publish this article back in October 2021 – Cass), I’ll be doing just that: Providing some reconnaissance on how this spin-off came to be, undertaking the dangerous mission within, and escaping with a report on the details of its legacy and impact on the franchise. We’ll also provide a brief bio on the game’s infamous ghost developer, Tose; who we’ve already covered a few games by in previous articles here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, but never really given a proper rundown / company profile on. Along the way, I’ll be doing my damndest to curb my biases — for both the Resident Evil IP and the broader light gun genre I hold so dear to my heart. But also, come on: It’s not every day that I get an excuse to talk about either on this site, so you’re gonna have to cut me at least a small bit of enthusiastic slack here. Now, with all that out of the way, let us “enter the world of survival horror”… or first-person shooting, as the case may be.

** Yeah, we’ll still get to Resident Evil 6 on here some day, don’t you worry. Just know that I’m probably not gonna be particularly mean to it. Sorry in advance to disappoint y’all? Now, when it comes to the subject of something like an Umbrella Corps, on the other hand…

“However, This Was Not the Only Location Where an Outbreak Occurred…”

“Tranquilizer 10mg in soup for every breakfast.
Hallucion 5mg in bread for every dinner.”
North American magazine print ad for Resident Evil Survivor.

I’m sure I don’t need to go over how the original Resident Evil / Biohazard quickly established itself as a flagship franchise for its publisher Capcom, and reinvigorated the horror genre with its fresh emphasis on scarce resources and “combat as a last resort.” Similarly, I’m not gonna recap its sequel, either; and how it brought the formula to near-perfection, paving the way for so many copycats and further survival horror trendsetters in the process. Nah, we’ll be picking up at around the time of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis’ 1999 release instead, and recounting the moment in time where Capcom were left to reconsider where exactly the series should go from that point forward. This isn’t to say that Nemesis was a financial flop or critical disaster, mind you. Quite the contrary: In its time, it was actually received quite well by most reviewers, and chalked up roughly 3.5 million in sales for the publisher — a 27% increase over cumulative sales of the franchise’s first installment.^[1] As to how those numbers compared against Resident Evil 2’s sales… well, let’s just assume everything was hunky-dory and headed upward, and that there was no cause at all for alarm or concern on Capcom’s part. (Yes, we’ll actually go into detail on those figures later in the article.) Ultimately, the conclusion reached by the publisher was that upcoming Resident Evil titles shouldn’t stray too far from their successful survival horror formula. At least not where it came to the mainline entries, anyway.

To this end, Capcom had been working between 1998 and 2000 to develop an entry in the series exclusive to the Nintendo 64 [after having brought Resident Evil 2 to the console]: The originally envisioned version of Resident Evil 0, under development by Capcom Production Studio 3 in apparent collaboration with ghost developer Tose. While the design was meant to fall more or less in line with the established gameplay seen in previous titles, it was intended to leverage the N64’s cartridge load time capabilities in order to facilitate a unique ‘Zapping’ mechanic — the ability to near-instantaneously switch between playable characters within different locations in the game’s world. For those who don’t know, this mechanic did in fact make it into the final product in order to become one of the game’s defining features (if not a somewhat contentious one), but wound up not necessitating the need for a cartridge after all: Resident Evil 0’s development on N64 was halted at a point in 2000, at which point it moved to Nintendo’s ‘Dolphin’ hardware — what would eventually become the GameCube console. But of course, what follows thereafter is outside the scope of this article (or at least this section of it). I only mention this bit of history to establish two things in particular: The involvement of Tose as a support studio, and Capcom’s willingness to allow third parties to involve themselves in shaping Resident Evil’s future.

Which begs the question: “Who the heck are Tose?” To answer that, we first need to define the concept of a “ghost developer,” for as seemingly self-evident as the term may be. Effectively, a ghost developer is a company which chooses to operate in anonymity — to forgo credit in providing contract work to game publishers [or in assisting other development studios]. Within the business, these studios are alternatively referred to as “cut-out companies,” indicating the implicit expectation that their credits are to be cut from a game’s final release. It’s a practice practically as old as the games industry itself, whose humble roots were first planted at a time where only a handful of electronics companies had the technical know-how needed in order to produce computer-driven amusements. Famously (by which I actually mean “quite secretly”), Nintendo would rely on the expertise of the television broadcast equipment manufacturer Ikegami Tsushinki in developing their earliest Z80-powered arcade machines, including no less than the likes of Donkey Kong. We’ve covered this pair’s working relationship briefly before (within the context of our article on Radar Scope), but I reckon I never really explored the reason why Ikegami were so content to let their due credit slide for so long? I suppose that’s due to the fact that there was never any clear statement made by them to shine a light on that particular mystery. As a matter of fact, it’s quite a rare thing to see ghost developers make anything in the way of public statements, or so much as let the world know that they even exist in the first place.

In guessing at why a developer like Ikegami Tsushinki would be content to have their credit omitted: One potential reason could be the general practice [at the time] of games companies to not disclose the identities of their employees, for fear of them being poached and recruited by competitors in the field. If you apply a similar sort of theoretical logic to how a ghost developer may operate, perhaps they too wanted to keep their staff on short leashes — maybe even to keep the very same publishers that contracted them from getting any ideas about stealing their star programmers for themselves? Alternatively, there’s the chance that these secret developers with more prominent / forward-facing fields of business didn’t want to be associated directly with involvement in the emerging video game market: It’s possible that many of them saw the game software boom as a passing fad — one which could potentially tarnish their reputations in the event that the electronic amusements business collapsed in on itself. Or maybe it comes down to a simple matter of ego: Where the publishers wanting to portray themselves as the “creative geniuses” driving this new wave of digital media didn’t want to have to share their credit, or otherwise fess up to the fact they weren’t quite as technically proficient as they made themselves out to be. And so, a ghost developer steps up without any expectation of credit — only the expectation of payment for their services and discretion. Whatever the case may have been in any given publisher-developer relationship, it was the ghost developers who would put in much of the real work on making their ordered games function, and who would’ve ultimately agreed to eschew acknowledgement of their contributions.

Tose Software established themselves as a resource for games publishers in need as early as November of 1979 — having been spun off from a larger electronics manufacture company ‘Toa Seiko Co.’ (est. 1952). And from almost the very start, they made their intentions and aspirations (or lack thereof) as developers clear. According to a vice president of their North American division, Masa Agarida: “Our policy is not to have a vision. Instead, we follow our customers’ visions. Most of the time we refuse to put our name on the games, not even staff names.”^[2] While that quote may read as their admitting to being unambitious as developers – almost as if confessing to a lack of their own creative drive – you’ll actually find that Tose were consistently made to push design convention and technical limitations in their work. In pledging to bring their customers’ visions to life, they often had to work diligently to translate those lofty requests into something actually functional in the context of a video game — whether implementing systems and mechanics without prior precedent for them to reference, or figuring out how to convey particularly elaborate character designs through comparatively primitive graphic rendering back in the day. This is all assuming, of course, that their customers are even all that ambitious in the first place: Just as frequently, Tose are tasked with producing bog-standard genre games, in cases where that’s all that their customers are looking for [or able to afford]. In this way, Tose’s catalogue bounces back and forth between genuinely inspired efforts and middling workmanlike products — the quality of their output contingent on how much time and how many resources are allotted to them by their clients. “You get what you pay for” and so forth.

With so much of Tose’s involvement in the games industry kept a closely guarded secret, it’s obviously difficult to write up a proper timeline for their history. There’s still a few facts that can be established for certain though, between the company’s small handful of confessions and compelling evidence as to some of their covert contributions. Their debut title would appear to be 1980’s arcade cabinet Sasuke VS Commander, produced on behalf of SNK. Interestingly, this is one of their few early games they fully admit to having developed on their website’s ‘Company History’ page, possibly due to the fact that they weren’t yet billing themselves as a ghost developer when they were first established. Sasuke VS Commander, for its part, is a fairly straightforward single-screen fixed-axis shooter, in which you play as the titular Sasuke and swear to “protect [your Shogun’s] life from ninja.” Waves of standard enemies are broken up by encounters against bosses with more elaborate attacks and movement patterns, where you’re rewarded on defeating them with additional points in the form of ‘Magical Bonuses.’ The very concept of “boss” enemies distinguishable from more interchangeable cannon fodder was quite novel at the time, as well as brief animated sequences that play during the game’s attract mode (a brief cutscene detailing the game’s premise) and game over screen (where Sasuke can be seen tripping over a rock and landing dead on his back). While clearly a game designed to cash in on the Space Invaders frenzy that was still gripping Japan, it also demonstrates early ambition on the part of Tose to distinguish their offerings from the rest of the pack — to perhaps entice other companies to contract them, to develop games that would stand out at the arcades. SNK were certainly impressed enough by what they had been handed, and kept Tose on to develop 1981’s side-scrolling shooter Vanguard; as well as its top-down 1984 sequel, Vanguard II. Repeat business such as this would become essential to Tose’s operations, as they worked to get into publishers’ good graces.

Tose’s company history mentions that August 1982 marked an expansion into “developing home video games,” though no specific examples are cited (naturally). It’s hard to discern exactly what output [if any] was produced over the course of the next two years, save for evidence they had a hand in developing 1983’s Apploon for the Sord M5 and PC-88 lines of home computers. It’s with a point on the timeline marked April 1984 where we get a more clear indication of what home console they’d be focusing on moving forward: Nintendo’s Family Computer. From here, it’s been discerned / speculated that they had a hand in converting no less than Taito’s original Space Invaders to the platform in 1985, which may well have served as their debut cartridge on the hardware? Locking in precise release dates for Famicom / NES titles is difficult enough on its own, without having to additionally consider for secretive developers. In any case, their output on Nintendo’s home console would go on to be quite prolific; between apparently assisting Nintendo themselves with the development of Kid Icarus, producing the first Dragon Ball tie-in game (as well as multiple subsequent installments) on behalf of Bandai, and generally filling in for the role of developer to aide dozens of other publishers looking to break into the home console market. Of course, putting out so many games meant that they also put out more than their fair share of stinkers — at least according to retrospective measure: For every title that’d go on to receive some amount of acclaim as a Bases Loaded (released as ‘Moero!! Pro Yakyū’ in Japan), there would be a kusogē along the lines of Ikki to pair… plus a Spelunker, Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E., and no less than three Karaoke Studio cartridges — just for good measure.

It’s easy for us to look back on some of these games and point to them as prototypical kusogē, and to further paint Tose themselves as being somewhat synonymous with the terminology. But I honestly find this practice to be a bit dismissive, and downright revisionist in the sense that it implies these games had always been perceived as sub-par from the very start. The truth of the matter is, Tose were developing games during a formative era for the industry, and that these titles we look back on as particularly “primitive” were vital in testing what the format was capable of — in helping figure out where it was all headed. When additionally considering the fact that if not for Tose, the NES’s early library would’ve surely far more shallow; there’s a serious argument that can be made here that Tose were downright instrumental to the console’s success — necessary in filling out an otherwise sparse catalogue, which helped position the system as a genuine contender in the market and a viable platform for other third-party studios. And when Nintendo began to roll out new hardware such as the Super NES and Game Boy, Tose would be there from their respective “day one(s)” in order to bolster those libraries as well. Granted, by the time these newer systems were hitting the market, many of the companies which once relied on Tose had by now started developing their own console / handheld titles in-house — becoming more hands-on with the games they were producing, and establishing their own unique voices as studios. The need for Tose to secretly develop a given company’s console games for them was becoming less practical, and thereby less of a viable business for the ghost developer themselves. They’d have to change how they marketed their services, and possibly focus on less glamorous varieties of software in order to stay relevant.

With all that in mind: Tose’s new role in the early ‘90s would come to settle as a go-to studio for cheaper conversion work, stop-gap sequels to established franchises, and an unending cavalcade of licensed fare. They were the developers a company would call when they had bitten off more than they could chew — when their A and B teams alike were both fully booked, and there was no one else available who could attend to committed games coming up due. In this way, they became something like the “pinch hitters” of the industry: Guaranteed to deliver a finished product of acceptable quality, and to satisfy whatever licensing obligations or marketing arrangements may have been looming over their customers’ heads. It’s a dirty job, but the industry really does require someone to do it. This purpose would continue to persist into the next generation of consoles, as the industry began its transition into 3D — where daunting new technologies again put lagging companies at a disadvantage, and Tose would step up to show ’em all how it was done… Or at least they would’ve, if they had any clue themselves on how to develop games in 3D. In actuality, they spent the better part of the mid-90s just pumping out Game Boy games; as they were either content to stay clear of the “cutting edge,” or were simply having to play catch-up themselves with the new tech. For what it’s worth, most of these Game Boy games amounted to simple compilation cartridges: Collections of small-screen conversions (or compressed multi-carts) of games by the likes of Konami, Namco; and even Nintendo themselves, in the case of the excellent Game & Watch Gallery series — reimagining Nintendo’s classic LCD games for their new generation of handhelds.

This isn’t to say that Tose were sitting out the fifth console generation entirely: They had been one of the earliest proponents of the 3DO Multiplayer console, dabbled in Sega Saturn development, and were slowly learning the ins and outs of Sony’s PlayStation by serving as a support studio. Would you believe me if I told you they had helped contribute to no less than Final Fantasy VII? So goes the unsubstantiated rumor, anyhow: They’re at least confirmed to have contributed to a number of other Final Fantasy titles in this period (Origins and Anthology on PS1, plus the series of Advance conversions for GBA), and to continue to support the franchise to this very day (most recently working on World of Final Fantasy and Pixel Remaster). But I do wanna circle back around to the 3DO for a minute here, on account of some rare insights doing so might help provide us. For as it turns out, Tose in this era had need of American programmers — English-speaking individuals who could additionally aide in localization, as well as provide impromptu translation services in-office and at trade shows. One such hire in 1992 would be Daniel Auld; who years later (in 2008) would be discovered to have previously worked at the company, and to have no qualms about revealing some of the studio’s secrets. It’s from his testimony that we can begin to paint a picture of Tose’s workplace culture: A studio split into separate divisions based on cartridge and CD-ROM games, where any given employee would be made to work on at least two games at a time.^[3] And by Daniel’s account, they were getting paid in peanuts for it — roughly ¥200,000 a month (comparable to $1,450 USD), all while the company’s executives were afforded absolutely lavish lifestyles:

“[The company president] was incredibly wealthy, which created a stark dichotomy with the rank-and-file workers (of which I was one). While the president was fussing over where to park his 10th boat, some of the programmers were paid so little, they actually had to stop eating near the end of the month when their money ran out.” ~ Daniel Auld, former programer for Tose^[3b]

Not much of what Daniel had to say is particularly flattering toward Tose. The picture he paints is a company whose culture was rotten to the core; between apparent gender discrimination (women employees were made to serve double-duty as cleaning staff, as men were specifically told not to clean their own messes), gross mismanagement hampering productivity, and an unethical practice of cutting employee’s salaries while simultaneously increasing their hours.^[3c] It was an incident centering around that last point of contention which ultimately drove Daniel to quit Tose in 1994; at which point the only response from the manager of his development team was to demand a portion of code he had been working on (something regarding a circular-shaped in-game magnifying glass for the title Yamamura Misa Suspense: Miyako Kurama Sansou Satsujin Jiken), which Daniel had evidently figured out how to accomplish on his own but had recently deleted the files relating to. When told by the manager that the team would simply “reproduce it without [him],” he made a point of making Daniel watch as he marched up to another employee and demanded that he explain how the American had managed his technical feat. Funnily enough, no one else on the team had any clue as to how to reproduce the effect themselves, and so the feature ultimately went un-implemented in the final game. Did I mention yet that nearly everyone at Tose were [alleged] program pirates; whose primary source of code / design knowledge came from “copying anything they could find” from other games (a practice referred to internally as “borrowing the idea”), and buying copies of their competitors games for the sole purpose of “putting the cartridge in their hardware and pulling the code apart” — to duplicate more complex game elements wholesale? Perhaps that’s why the rest of the team struggled to come up with their own method for accomplishing a similar effect, without the benefit of existing code to directly copy from.

All these revelations probably cast the company in a far less flattering light than I may have initially set out to. I’d recommend just taking it as a friendly reminder that most major studios / game companies engage in similar sorts of unethical practices (if not worse). Yes, even your personal favorites. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, y’all. Getting back to what Tose were actually producing by this point in the back half of the 90s: With the PlayStation emerging as the definitive platform of the fifth generation, the studio did eventually devote themselves to it as their home console of choice (in terms of development), and eventually got the knack for 3D games. There’s indication that 1997’s Indy 500 may have been one of the first of their fully-polygonal products, followed soon after by… 1999’s Bass Landing? Look, we’re dealing with a very much incomplete catalogue of their collected works here: There’s the likely chance that Tose contributed to potentially dozens of 3D in this era, but that they’re just not known to us at this current moment in time. But I’m gonna bet on my own hypothesis here, as informed by the games that we do know they worked on: Tose were simply more comfortable operating in the 2D space, and largely sought out projects which spoke to that skillset. Look toward their console conversions of Namco’s arcade series of Point Blank light gun titles with very limited 3D elements, or the likes of their Dragon Ball fighting games which continued to leverage 2D sprites in front of relatively primitive 3D backgrounds — between a number of other attempts at keeping the torch for two dimensions lit on a console that was quickly becoming more synonymous with the third. Add to that the fact that the Game Boy (and its ‘Color’ iteration) was still far and away the platform they provided the most support for, and we can see where their strengths were still best suited.

Ultimately though, they’d have little choice but to adapt or die. As the sixth console generation loomed ever nearer, they could either try (and likely fail) to stick to their 2D/3D hybrids, focus entirely on their handheld work, or otherwise start challenging themselves to keep contemporary with their customers. Perhaps Capcom’s offer to support the Resident Evil series made for a comfortable transitory phase — a chance to work on games which fundamentally operated in the same way as top-down 2D titles (in terms of character and object collision), with simpler pre-rendered backdrops allowing them to focus on character models as nearly the sole 3D element. With that in mind, Resident Evil 0 on N64 would’ve been the perfect introductory gig for them… if not for the fact it had to go and get delayed until the arrival of the sixth console generation. But as it turns out, Capcom had another gig lined up to keep Tose busy: Taking Resident Evil down the route of a spin-off series, and testing its potential to deviate from the established fixed-camera survival horror formula. Now, in lieu of any actual insights into the planning and development process of the game that would become Biohazard Gun Survivor (We’re gonna stick with its original title for the time being, until it comes time to delineate between it and the North American release), we can only really speculate as to how Capcom landed on the concept of a hybridized first-person shooter as the direction that their first spin-off would head — the idea to put players ‘behind the mask’ (stylistically all lowercase), as the game was originally subtitled / marketed.

For starters, I’d be shocked if the success of Sega’s The House of the Dead series didn’t play at least some small part in this; as Capcom may have sought to assert their dominance in the zombie sub-genre, or otherwise provide the PlayStation with a comparable sort of shooting experience? Or perhaps Capcom’s ambitions may have been even grander than that: No less than the want to take Resident Evil to arcades, where they could hope to challenge Sega’s franchise more directly. When we get to reviewing the contents of Gun Survivor, we’ll find that much of its design does lend itself to a sort of arcade experience; between constant forward momentum, branching routes, and a control scheme which could be mapped entirely to a light gun peripheral. Past that, we’ll also see how Capcom eventually did manage to take the series into the arcades — but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here. If you’re looking for an alternative explanation as to why Capcom were suddenly experimenting with genres, we should perhaps look back at Resident Evil 3: Nemesis again. Where that entry had surely proven financially successful with its aforementioned 3.5 million in sales, I deliberately held back one piece of information earlier: The fact that Resident Evil 2 before it had totalled no less than 11 million units sold by 1999, across its various releases and revisions.^[4] When looking at Nemesis’ numbers in this new light, they’re far less flattering — indicative of a massive drop-off, and a potential sign that their established formula was reaching a point of stagnation. The series may not have been in critical danger yet, but the downward trend could eventually take it down below the point of profitability, from which they might not have been able to recover it.

What I imagine this prompting is internal discussion at Capcom as to how much change they may need to make — how far the Resident Evil franchise could potentially deviate from its roots in order to expand their audience, while also not deviating so far as to lose their brand identity / alienate committed fans. To this end, allowing a spin-off title to test these waters surely made the most sense, rather than immediately committing a full-on numbered installment to such sweeping changes. And if Capcom could offload the burden of conducting this experiment to a third-party studio, they could continue to focus their core teams’ efforts toward development on the next tentpole entry in the series; ensuring that in the event that the spin-off failed in its purpose, they’d still have a new highly polished title waiting in the wings to help regain confidence in / re-establish expectations for the brand. So explains Resident Evil 0‘s development running concurrent with Gun Survivor. And in examining how the latter still manages to stay in line with the larger franchise while changing up the genre, we can find that it’s not really all that massive a leap: At its core, it’s still a game about shooting zombies [and a variety of other monsters] across a collection of more-or-less real life locales — healing your wounds with dubious herbs, and having to scrounge for limited munitions. If history had played out differently, there’s nothing to say that the original Resident Evil wouldn’t have worked within a first-person perspective, where the change in genre isn’t quite so drastic as a turn-based strategy or RPG title. Putting a lightgun in your hands with which to make the shooting that much more visceral is a natural progression on the established formula, and one which could allow Gun Survivor to appeal to an audience which was more interested in the series’ zombie-killing than its methodical resource management and puzzle-solving. After all: If there’s one thing we love here in the States, it’s our guns.

… So, here’s the part of the article where we have to take a depressing pause, and recognize the impact that the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 had on North America and the world at large. The ability for a pair of teenagers to obtain factory-manufactured firearms and produce their own explosives revealed massive failings in how easily accessible such hugely destructive weapons are, and their use of said lethal ordnance to conduct an act of terror against the population of a high school represents one of the most horrifying atrocities that the human mind can comprehend. As the public at large cried out in search of answers and solutions, the search for a scapegoat and an “easy fix” to this deeply nuanced issue resulted in massive overreaches attempting to place the blame squarely on consumer media; as special interest and political advocacy groups capitalized on the tragedy in order to demonize whatever genres of music, movies, and video games they saw an opportunity to censor and upend. Of course, the actions taken against these forms of art were ultimately as effective as actual attempts to pass gun control laws and establish practical measures to prevent further such tragedies from occurring in the future — which is to say, not very effective at all. But in the immediate aftermath of the shooting (occurring April 20th, 1999) and through the height of the moral panic it ignited, the video game industry did seem to take collective measures in avoiding being inadvertently embroiled in the controversy, and would preemptively alter the content of a number of games set to release in North America over the course of the following years.

Which brings us back to Biohazard Gun Survivor, and its planned launch in the United States. The game had no complications releasing in Japan on January 27th, 2000, with all its content and features intact. And in early February of that same year, preview copies of the game would be sent to press for summary on North American news websites, with the title still being billed as ‘Resident Evil Gun Survivor’ (where the ‘Biohazard’ franchise has had to be rebranded due to trademark issues stemming from existing games** and a musical act bearing the name^[5]) and light gun support still advertised as a feature.^[6][7] But as the localization process continued to drag on, curious changes were eventually made to the game: Its European release on March 31st, 2000 would drop the word ‘Gun’ from the title, resulting in its now being branded simply as Resident Evil Survivor. And yet more time continued to pass — extending until August 30th of that year, when the similarly-titled Resident Evil Survivor was finally granted its North American launch. Only now, there was a major change made to the game: Light gun support was stripped out entirely, to the point where it couldn’t even be re-enabled with the use of Action Replay or GameShark code modifications. For the record, the earliest news reporting I could find on this subject comes to us from an IGN article posted May 11th, in which reporter Dave Zdyrko observes “the American release of the game will not be compatible with any lightgun (can anyone say Columbine?).”^[8] Clearly, Capcom had been so worried about the game potentially being associated with the potential to inspire real-life shootings, that they went to great lengths in order to ensure that Survivor could in no way be made to function with a light gun in hand… unless the theoretical consumer in question would have chosen to simply import the game and play it on a modified / similarly-imported console while waiting for its official North American release.

What makes this move all the more curious is the fact that other developers / publishers seemed entirely unafraid of releasing games with light gun support for the PlayStation post-1999; including Namco’s Time Crisis: Project Titan, Fox Interactive’s Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas, and Ubisoft’s Gunfighter: The Legend of Jesse James. The only other light gun game for PS1 which had skipped North America while releasing in Japan and Europe would’ve been Namco’s Rescue Shot in 2000; which itself made for an equally curious decision as well, considering the fact that the game was intended as a “non-violent” title — a shooter where your bullets aren’t intended to physically harm to any of the cutesy creatures you pelt over the course of the game. Perhaps it was specifically due to the fact it presented firing a gun as a cartoonish / “whimsical” act which could’ve caused potential blowback? In any event, the decision to remove light gun support from [and de-emphasize the very use of the word “gun” in the title of] Resident Evil Survivor was surely one which would spark a different kind of controversy entirely: The alleged “censorship” of a game which released in other territories with all its features intact, and the ostensible worsening of its gameplay by forcing players to use the standard controller in lieu of a peripheral they may have potentially owned. Except, there weren’t really too many places for gamers to congregate and complain about the changes online, outside of Usenet newsgroups and maybe a small handful of forums? And while I could certainly find a number of posts on ‘alt.games.resident-evil’ bemoaning the loss of light gun support (the earliest complaint of the functionality being cut dating back to April 4th), more folk seemed interested in slagging the game for a variety of other reasons. But to understand where they may have been coming from, we’ll have to first have to review the game for ourselves.

** In the interview with Capcom US’ Chris Kramer (at the time their ‘Senior Director of Communications and Community’) that I source, Kramer mentions a “crappy DOS-based game had just come out in the US called ‘Biohazard’” as being an example given to Capcom’s marketing department in explaining how the name “Biohazard” would be impossible to secure a trademark for.^[5b] This would seem to be an allusion to the [actually quite excellent] 1993 Apogee Software action-platformer Bio Menace, which had previously been advertised as ‘Bio Hazard’ for a period within their catalogues. So, ultimately, the release of Bio Menace should’ve been a non-factor in trademarking Biohazard as Resident Evil’s branding in the States. What may have been a genuine conflict was the 1992 Sega Genesis title Bio-Hazard Battle? But even this seems fairly dubious to me. All told, it’s my hypothesis that it really just came down to potential worries that the title ‘Biohazard’ simply might not market as well in North America as a uniquely-crafted one.

“My Dad and My Mom Turned Into Monsters.”

“I may have been a bad person, but that was before! That’s not who I am now!”
Japanese PS1 release front cover.

1998… I’ll never forget it. It was the year when those grisly murders occured in the Arklay Mountains. Seriously: We’re talking, like, whole families getting their corpses chewed up, haggard-looking dogs running around a forest, and this one dude’s head even fell off! Sick stuff. Anyway, the news was out to the whole world revealing that it was the fault of a secret viral experiment conducted by the international pharmaceutical enterprise, Umbrella. The virus broke out in a nearby mountain community, Raccoon City, and hit the peaceful little town with a devastating blow, crippling its very foundation. You should’ve seen it, man: Big rigs exploding, a huge dude in a trench coat, militarized cops getting mowed down by zombie hoards — honestly, it was cool as shit. Then the President of the United States decided to see what would happen if he actually pressed that red button at his desk, and wouldn’t you know it? The mad lad actually went and nuked the city! Seeing as it’s pretty hard to keep that sort of thing under wraps, the United States government issued an indefinite suspension of business decree to Umbrella. Soon its stock prices crashed – truly, the most terrifying development in this whole story – and for all intents and purposes, Umbrella was finished. But that wound up taking a whole five years to happen, somehow? So, in the meantime, let’s hear about yet another viral outbreak that Umbrella managed to get in trouble for, within just a literal month of the Raccoon City incident.

Meet Ark Thompson: A private investigator who survives a fiery helicopter crash, only to discover he’s forgotten who exactly he is. At the very least able to quickly realize that he’s trapped within the middle of another troublesome zombie outbreak, he determines that his “only hope” is a pistol in his hand (a Glock 17, incidentally), and that he “must remember” in order to survive. What he comes to discover is that he’s currently stuck on Sheena Island: Another one of Umbrella’s bio-weapon research facilities masquerading as an unassuming little township, where their propensity for viral outbreaks has seriously gone and turned the whole place upside-down. One of the first bodies Ark stumbles upon is a man in a white coat clutching onto dog tags with Ark’s own name written on them — unbeknownst to him that this man is no less than the one responsible for crashing his helicopter mere minutes ago (as seen in the game’s introductory cutscene). But because Ark is currently suffering from video game amnesia, he doesn’t immediately make any connection here, and is comically later convinced that he actually possesses the identity of the man in the coat: Vincent Goldman — the Director of Operations for Umbrella at the Sheena Island facility, and the villain ultimately responsible for this current outbreak of the T-Virus. What follows is a series of wacky misunderstandings between Ark and a few remaining survivors on the European island; including a disgruntled sewer worker named Andy, and two children Lott and Lily Klein. All the while, Ark must contend with the evil deeds he has convinced himself he’s responsible for, as well as gunning down hordes of the mutated and undead. Just another day in the life of a private eye.

What kicks this fairly standard premise up a notch is the method in which the game’s story is told: Branching paths dictate which antagonists will feature more prominently in a given playthrough, as well as revelations regarding the island revealed across the environments and files you’ll discover on your chosen path. While every permutation of the game’s possible routes will – perhaps disappointingly – still culminate in the same ending stretch; this conceit can still serve its purpose in compelling you to replay the brief campaign several times over, in order to piece together the full story that Gun Survivor intends to tell. That, and to experience all the different arrangements of enemies, as well as collect a small handful of hidden handguns — not to mention, nabbing yourself the series-staple ‘Rocket Launcher’ [with infinite ammo] awarded for beating the game with an ‘S Rank.’ While these replay incentives clearly serve as a continuation of the larger franchise’s established traditions, it’s worth pointing out that the concept of “branching paths” certainly wasn’t unique to Resident Evil — that even The House of the Dead had been incorporating a similar routing system since its first installment, to point to a genre contemporary. Bearing that in mind, Gun Survivor’s approach to branching paths seems to borrow more from the arcade school of design – wherein alternate paths take you along distinctly different series of screens and locations – rather than Capcom’s own approach of making choices at key points along a set path in order to ultimately determine your ending. More on how all this specifically manifests / pans out within Gun Survivor later.

The first aspect of gameplay we have to address here are obviously the controls, which are contingent on what method(s) of input you’re allowed. If you’re playing in Japan or Europe, you’ll have your choice between either your PlayStation controller or a compatible light gun; whereas those in North America will simply have the controller at their disposal, owing to aforementioned content concerns. To make one thing clear right out the gate here: Neither controller set-up necessarily lends itself to conventional first-person shooter control, and each have their own unique advantages and drawbacks to contend with. Starting with the controller then: Your D-pad [or left analog stick] allows you to move and turn in the classic “tank” style, as well as to move your crosshairs across the screen while in ‘Aim’ mode. Naturally, holding down the R1 button will transition you into this state, wherein you’ll also find yourself unable to move until exiting it. Between pressing X to either pick up items or fire your gun, the square button allowing you to run while moving, and the L1 button intending to serve as an ‘Auto-Focus’ (where it will ostensibly snap your view to the nearest enemy or point of interest); that’s effectively your whole lot as far as controls. No strafing, jumping, or quick melee — not even the ability to reload, shockingly enough. For that, you’ll either have to expend your magazine in full; or endure the tedious process of accessing your inventory (by pressing ‘Start’), finding your corresponding ammo within the slowest-scrolling list I’ve ever seen, and ‘combining’ it with your weapon of choice — an archaic procedure pulled from Resident Evil’s past. In any case, these limited controls are really all you need: The mindless monsters you’ll face don’t necessitate much more in the way of tactics, beyond shooting and stepping away. And considering the fact that you can now walk during automated reloading, you can likely save yourself the hassle of inventory management hell.

The lightgun controls, by comparison, prove woefully inadequate in the movement department, but carry an inherent advantage in quicker / more accurate aiming. Your standard PlayStation light gun (most typically a Namco model of ‘GunCon’) comes paired with two additional buttons, labeled ‘A’ and ‘B.’ In Gun Survivor, these allow you to turn left and right individually, and can be pressed simultaneously to access inventory. Good luck navigating those menus with a light gun, by the way! But the limited inputs here raise an obvious question: How do you actually move forward and backwards? For that, you have to aim off-screen, and hold down the trigger in order to start walking. Pulling and holding the trigger again while walking will consequently allow you to run, where pulling the trigger twice rapidly will allow for back-stepping. This is all sensible enough on paper, and isn’t impossible to get acclimated to; but makes for a clunky control scheme nonetheless, where the combination of button presses and very particular gun orientation can render reactive movement (in the case of dodging) especially frustrating. I think the ideal scenario would have entailed some method where the buttons on the gun peripheral shifted you between moving and aiming – much as on a standard controller – and where shooting at the edges of the screen in movement mode would either orient or start you walking in those corresponding directions. But I suppose that takes away somewhat from the feeling of having your gun drawn and ready to fire at all times, which is what a light gun perhaps best lends itself to? All I can say is, when it comes to off-rails first-person shooters, freedom of movement can often prove more essential in moment-to-moment gameplay than the actual precision of your aim.

What I think Resident Evil Survivor was really setting out to do here was to develop a sort of hybrid take on the rail shooter; where your movement abilities are less about reactiveness, and more about positioning yourself in the ways that an on-rails game would typically handle automatically. When you get down to the core of their design, rail shooters like House of the Dead and Virtua Cop are built to challenge your abilities to aim and react across a series of pre-determined perspectives and distances — testing you with an unpredictable variety of different angles and proximities to your targets. Gun Survivor, then, is about putting that power in your hands, and deciding for yourself what shooting positions work best with your preferences / the enemies at hand. If you’re the sort who prefers to maneuver and stand as far away as possible from hostiles as you can, you can absolutely do so against the majority of monsters on offer. If you want to test your close-quarters combat skills by shooting and weaving your way through looser groupings of enemies, that’s an option too (albeit a riskier one). At the end of the day, it’s less about your ability to dodge and respond to approaching baddies, and more about establishing whatever range of engagement you’re most comfortable operating within — whether you’re more inclined to deal with targets at a distance, or prefer to line up precision shots on closer targets for location damage bonuses.

I reckon this all makes for a novel approach to first-person shooting, and one that complements the sort of similar risk-reward system of shooting distance seen in mainline Resident Evils; where there’s inherent safety in engaging enemies from a distance, but where the ability to blow heads clean off requires closing that gap in order to effectively leverage your vertical aim. Of course, I’m paying compliment to this intention without yet measuring its actual execution. For this system to actually work, it requires the settings that you navigate to provide some degree of open space, and for the types of enemies that you’ll encounter to play along nicely as you take the requisite time to position yourself. Naturally, the expectation here shouldn’t necessarily be that the baddies wait patiently in place until you get into position and shout “ready”: Only that the game gives you enough time on entering into a room in order to quickly assess the situation, plot your move to a strategic position, and be ready to shoot as soon as you reach it. And for the most part, Gun Survivor gives you that necessary breathing room in order to pick your spot, before subsequently challenging the viability of your positioning as enemies close in and occasionally attempt to outmaneuver you. To that latter point: There are hard-coded behavioral habits baked into the monster AI which see them preferring to attack you from the front (more on this later), which lends itself to a style of shooting that doesn’t necessitate having to constantly turn in place to face threats from every angle all at once. This is a good thing, as Gun Survivor‘s controls don’t really lend themselves to that kind of pivoting on a dime — as I think we’ve established by this point.

You know what else Resident Evil Survivor’s controls aren’t particularly well-suited for? Hunting for interactable objects within cluttered environments, or having to backtrack distances in order to solve its incredibly basic puzzles. It’s in these attempts to imitate the style of progression seen in the mainline Resident Evil titles that the game is clearly at its weakest, as the clumsy controls don’t suit that style of gameplay at all. In example: Having to slowly circle around larger objects (such as film projectors and hospital MRI machines) to determine which specific angle the designers intended for you to be able to interact with them doesn’t make for a particularly compelling puzzle in and of itself. As an added matter of baffling design, the game typically “hides” its keys [and key items] just a room or two away from their intended destinations, rendering the act of fetching them somewhat pointless in the process. As such, a typical “puzzle” in Gun Survivor effectively amounts to finding a locked door or static object in a room, navigating into the next accessible room in order to find its associated key / missing component, and returning (typically within a minute or two) in order to unlock it and progress. Without anything in the way of more complicated problem-solving to break up the shooting gameplay, these diversions ultimately feel like they’re implemented out of obligation rather than a genuine attempt at variety — something that Tose had to check off a list in order to place Gun Survivor closer in line with what players expect out of a Resident Evil game. And while the mainline entries’ own puzzles are rarely too complex themselves, they do at least require some minor amount of environmental awareness and item management on a player’s part. By comparison, you can just sleepwalk your way through Gun Survivor’s forced detours, knowing that you won’t have to engage any part of your brain beyond basic navigational functions.

I suppose we should explore the subject of exactly what sort of environments you’ll be exploring, and explain how the game generally progresses. Where previous Resident Evils delighted in designing completely impractical estates and establishments riddled with traps galore – the decidedly not up-to-code Spencer Mansion,  Raccoon City’s curiously architectured Police Department, and the unsafe work environments of the Umbrella laboratories housed beneath both – Gun Survivor eschews this tradition in favor of comparatively straightforward city planning. In example: At the beginning of the game, you’re given a key which can unlock any one of three doors from within an alley, marking your first choice in deciding your route through Sheena Island; between a church, movie theater, and restaurant. Serving as relatively short sojourns, these destinations are all relatively realistic in their depictions of real-world public facilities, albeit populated by a particularly hostile clientele. There are neat touches here that provide a glimpse into life in an Umbrella-run city, such as prominent company branding behind the church’s altar (as well as underneath the movie theater’s screen); indicating that employment under the corporation is tantamount to indoctrination, and the fact that most every resident on the island so happens to be under their employ — whether they realize it or not. Ultimately, all three paths eventually lead you to the same stretch of city boardwalk, where you’re confronted with your second choice in progression: Either an arcade, a hospital, or library.

It’s also at this point that you may unknowingly (on first playthrough) lock in your choice of primary antagonist for the remainder of your playthrough. Choosing the arcade will see Umbrella’s ‘Cleaner’ squad** deployed to the island — gun-toting humanoids in tactical uniform, who make animalistic noises and melt into the ground on being shot. If you should select the library, you’ll have continued run-ins with the sewer worker Andy, who is similarly convinced that you’re Vincent / responsible for the viral outbreak. Finally, there’s the hospital, which sees the real Vincent become your primary foil during your continuing attempts to escape the island. His route seems to unleash a swarm of T-103s – perhaps better known to most as ‘Tyrants’ – seen donning the same apparel as worn by Resident Evil 2’s ‘Mr. X.’ What this turn ultimately reveals is that Sheena Island serves as no less than a production facility for these models of Umbrella bio-organic weapons, as well as the fact that Leon and Claire must’ve been chumps if they wound up having so much trouble against just the one of them: Ark mows these trenchcoated tenderfoots down like it’s a trifle for him! It’s also within these different routes that you’ll find the game’s collectible handguns – labeled in-game simply as ‘Handgun B’ (resembling a CZ75), ‘C’ (Beretta 8000), and ‘D’ (Nambu 14) – which all vary in damage, capacity, and fire rate. Of course, seeing as you can only select one route per playthrough, this is all further incentive to replay the game in order to collect them all — where you retain your previously obtained items and arsenal on starting a new playthrough.

I, for one, find this whole conceit pretty neat! Each route serving up unique sets of enemies [in addition to the unique locales] is really a quite novel way of messing with player expectations on subsequent runs, and the alternate story beats are a nice touch as well. It gives you a real sense that your choices matter beyond just what locations you’ll visit along a route, and leaves you wondering if you can potentially learn how to mix and match different gameplay and story elements to your preference. This illusion is aided by the fact that enemy placements are occasionally “randomized” on a room-to-room basis — picked out from a small handful of preset arrangements, which I think might be influenced in some capacity by either your choice of route or general performance (likely either how much damage you’ve taken or how many enemies you’ve killed)? Now, with all that being said and due compliments having been paid: None of the choices you’ll make past this point are quite as significant as this juncture; where you’ve already locked in your main antagonist at this point, and found the only route-exclusive weapon you’ll be able to add to your loadout. From here on out, the branching routes only amount to different locations you’ll visit en route to the final stage, and the potential for a small handful of unique enemy encounters contained within them. We’ll get more into how this represents a potentially wasted opportunity later in the review. But for now, just bear the fact in mind that we’ve already made the first and last decision of truly significant import — the only one which seems to reverberate throughout the rest of the game.

After each of these three paths spit you out into the sewers, you’ll stumble on Andy’s presumably stinky living quarters within, where there’s no less than wall-to-wall photos taken of you seeming to confirm your identity as Vincent — much to Ark’s dismay. After voice actor Patrick Harlan puts in his best attempt at a dramatic read (“No… This is me! I am Vincent! It was all my fault!”), a young boy [Lott] enters the room and seems to react to you as if you’re a murderous monster (“Please don’t kill me! I didn’t know anything about you then!”), which must really serve to kick Ark while he’s already down. As you might expect, the voice-acting on display here is pretty stilted and lousy all around, in that charmingly off-beat way which Resident Evil had already begun to become synonymous with. We’ll cover a few more of these sorts of cutscenes as the game progresses, but it’s worth establishing nice and early that the actors themselves can’t be blamed [entirely] for how awkwardly these lines come across: Between Patrick Harlan as Ark, Colleen Lanki as Lott, Ruth Hollyman as Lily, Walter Roberts as Andy, and Michael Naishtut as Vincent; these were all working voice actors with established video game credits to their name — a few of whom even held residency in Japan! Patrick, for example, was already part of a popular manzai comedy duo ‘Pakkun Makkun’ (alongside Yoshida Makoto), and must’ve been at least somewhat familiar with being directed by Japanese producers. Colleen, for her part, would’ve already played a role in Shenmue‘s localization, and would later go on to voice the undefeatable Sarah Bryant in Virtua Fighter 4.

Bearing these bona fides in mind, we have to ask the question of “what went wrong” when it came time for the English voice-acting talent to hit the booth? Because as it bears pointing out, Resident Evil Survivor had its dialogue written specifically with North American voice actors in mind — with the game’s sole provided performances (across all regions) being these English line reads. This had been the case in all Resident Evil games prior as well, and would continue to serve as more or less the series standard in the years to follow. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Capcom had a functional workflow in place yet for getting “intended” performances out of their cast: According to Pablo Kuntz – the original voice of Albert Wesker – the first game’s production didn’t bother to account for a director to oversee / give notes on vocal performances.^[9] Something tells me that not too much had changed between ’95 and the year 2000. Add to that a combination of clunkily-formatted English-language scripts, a decree that talent should read the lines exactly as they were written, and conventional wisdom among American actors in Japan that they were expected to “overact” in order to please producers; and you’ve got a recipe for some laughably disjointed dialogue. But of course, I’m not really here to criticize it all or count it as a mark against Gun Survivor: If anything, it’s a point in the game’s favor, seeing as it adds such an endearing quality to it all. It’s not as if more genuinely dramatic performances in this context would’ve done anything to better sell its inherently contrived and goofy premise, so we may as well just accept it as being an extra layer of entertainment.

Getting back to the gameplay: Your next point of divergence – after clearing out a police station with the curious name of ‘Paradise,’ and hopefully grabbing the game’s SPAS-12 shotgun from within – sees you electing to go back to traveling through the sewers, or staying on the surface to decide between a destination of either nightclub or warehouse. If you elect for the sewers, you’ll have to face a pair of gigantic alligators ripped straight out of Resident Evil 2 (🔊), only this time without the benefit of conspicuous explorable canisters that you can stick in their mouths in order to one-shot them. The screen wherein you face both of them simultaneously (where one emerges from behind you as a surprise blockage to your escape route) may well prove the single most difficult encounter in the entire game… which may not sound like much when I go on to tell you that Gun Survivor as a whole is pretty easy. But trust me on this: Dealing with these two gators is probably one of the trickiest binds in the history of the whole Resident Evil franchise. Short of the Handgun D or Magnum revolver, none of your other weapons seem to have any effect on them — where the shotgun in particular seems to be completely useless. By comparison, dealing with either a series of T-103s in the nightclub or a squad of cleaners in the warehouse feels like child’s play. Perhaps knowing this, the developers almost seem to hide the entrance to that sewer route (found within the police station, behind where you’re made to face as you exit through a door from a cell block), figuring that anyone meticulous enough to actually stumble on it will have a better chance of actually surviving it.

It should be noted that on the whole, Gun Survivor doesn’t really ask players to do much in the way of exploration: Most paths are presented as entirely linear, where your only diversions might consist of checking small self-contained rooms along the way. Larger open areas are also something of a rarity — typically reserved for the latter half of the game, and usually not rewarding you for hiking all the way out to their edges. The most you might hope to find for diligently checking corners may be an odd red or green herb – a first-aid spray, if you’re lucky – though there aren’t even too many in the way of “corners” to actually check. Past a certain point, you realize that most spaces amount to simple rectangular arenas, with precious little in the way of clutter or cover to line them. In that way, the environments can honestly be a bit boring, even as the scenery drastically changes as frequently as you move from one location to another: It effectively amounts to swapping tilesets on otherwise interchangeable rooms. The shame of it is that this not only misses on a key element of what keeps spaces in rail shooters feeling dynamic, but also betrays a design principle of the larger Resident Evil franchise: Even the most seemingly mundane of rooms should present opportunities to not only catch players off guard, but to further send them bumping into clutter and scenery as they stumble to position themselves. Perhaps given Gun Survivor’s narrow field of first-person vision though, the potential to get stuck on objects while walking backwards [and not recognize what’s happening] would’ve proven too frustrating for some?

I’ll also take this opportunity to note a mechanical consideration, rooted in another established “tradition” (more accurately, a technical limitation) of the previous Resident Evil games: Only one variety of enemy can generally be assembled to populate a room at any given moment in time, barring maybe a grand total of one or two exceptions (I recall being attacked by a combination of spiders and zombie in one room of the hospital, and having a dog sicced on me in addition to a T-103 after stepping off an aerial tram). This is to say that if you walk into a room with zombies in it, you can reasonably expect to only encounter more zombies as you turn corners or watch further enemies pouring in. As you traverse sewers and are beset by poisonous spiders, you can rest safe in the knowledge that you won’t suddenly have to deal with a hunter or a tyrant on top of that. In the original games, this was due to a limitation of system memory, wherein reserving space for more than one type of enemy at a time would’ve taxed the hardware to a point where performance could’ve potentially been affected. I imagine that Gun Survivor probably has to deal with similar issues of memory budgeting, and that Tose ultimately landed on much the same solution as Capcom themselves had years prior. The potentially unintentional benefit of this is that when you’re presented with a veritable horde of baddies, you don’t have to worry about getting simultaneously charged from the front and flanked on your sides by different enemy types, at the very least. Where that might sound like a downside to some – interpreted as a lack of meaningful challenge in combat – I’ll again contend that the controls are woefully inadequate for dealing with much more than this.

Back to the action: The three previously mentioned routes all feed you to Umbrella’s headquarters on the island, where Ark will start experiencing head-pounding flashbacks to events the player themself are not quite privy to yet. You’ll go up and down some elevators, get potentially jump-scared by a Tyrant bursting through the wall in Vincent’s office, and eventually meet Lott’s sister Lily. But before you get a chance to talk to the kiddo, you’ll first be treated to what might well be the most hilarious vocal performance seen across this historically cheesy franchise: A voicemail left for Vincent by his mother – performed by an uncredited actor putting on the fakest “elderly grandma” mannerism imaginable – in which she begs her son to “stop performing those terrible crimes, and just come back home.” This inspired monologue is followed shortly thereafter by Ark approaching Lily, her attempting to run away in an incredibly janky animation – allowing for seconds of complete dead air between every line of dialogue – Ark grabbing hold of her to ask her what the tape was about, and her responding with an earnest “I don’t know! I was only listening to it because I’m so bored!” It’s at this point that Lott enters the scene, starts swinging a bat in the general direction of Ark, and contends that “You’ll kill me if I drop it! I’m not stupid!” The two children eventually run away, leaving Ark to stand in place and delayedly explain “I know you think that I’m a murderer, but you’re wrong! I would never do anything like that.” End scene on one of the most awkward narrative sequences ever contained on a Sony PlayStation CD-ROM — “Jill Sandwich,” eat your heart out. I can only highly recommend watching the whole two-minute comedy of errors for yourself (🔊).

Leaving the room leads you to an odd one-off bit where you have to use a keycard you picked up earlier in order to deactivate a security gate, or otherwise be attacked by a pair of so-called ‘Evolved Lickers.’ Beyond that is a parking lot where you can find your requisite M79 grenade launcher, a canal where you continue chase after Lott and Lily (and get accosted by a duo of giant spiders who consistently encounter collision issues), and eventually to the Klein residence; where Lily can be found hiding inside a closet in the children’s bedroom, next to a poster for an indiscernible Street Fighter game [prominently featuring Cammy]. It’s here where Lily will reveal that her and Lotts’ parents have already died as a result of the viral outbreak (The official guidebook reveals that both parents were actually employees at Umbrella’s ‘Gene Application Engineering Library,’ and as such are partially responsible for this whole mess), and that her brother has headed off toward the island’s Tyrant manufacturing plant in search of a means of escape. Now with a renewed sense of purpose, Ark attempts to comfort Lily by telling her that although he “may have been a bad person,” that’s not who he is anymore; before promising to bring back her brother, and vowing to himself that he “will save these two kids — I swear it!” For whatever it’s worth, I really do like this turn in Ark’s character development; where if you somehow haven’t picked up yet on the obvious clues that Ark was never actually the villain he thinks he is, this believed “redemption arc” makes for an interesting twist on the typical Resident Evil playable protagonist. I mean, I reckon that Carlos Oliveira in Resident Evil 3 may have beaten Ark to the punch by a year here, but it’s still a trope that I’ll never tire of.

From here, you begin to make your way toward Umbrella’s factory, where you’ll find that aerial tram is your method of getting there. First, you’ll have to go and manually activate the car, and deal with a couple of higher threat enemies along the way — hunters busting down doors and another pair of evolved lickers bursting through windows. No idea how Lott would’ve gotten ahead of you given all this – let alone how he’s managed to survive on the island for this long – but that’s neither here nor there. Stepping off the tram then brings us to the last branching path in the game: A choice between an underground tunnel, darkened forest path, and a cliffside crossing; all leading you to a dilapidated mansion where the Tyrant factory lurks beneath. Personally, I like taking the cliffside route, as you immediately encounter a curiously silent avalanche (🔊) and get dropped into a canyon populated by Mr. Xs. No matter the path, you’ll wind up having to clear a courtyard of hunters camped outside the mansion façade, before entering into the obligatory “final circuit” within an Umbrella laboratory setting. Say what you will about Gun Survivor‘s lack of larger interiors and elaborate traps, but they certainly knew to circle back around to the familiar formula come game’s end. With that being said: This whole stretch is honestly a slog, between its prolonged backtracks and easy-to-miss interactable objects. In particular, there’s a brief “puzzle” in which you’ll pick up an ‘Activation Disk’ in one room, need to backtrack three rooms in order to find a computer terminal, and proceed to bang your body against it from every conceivable angle — until you find the one sweet spot that allows you to actually insert the disk and power on the rest of the laboratory. I swear, this stupidly specific angle of approach continues to throw me off on replays, to where I keep convincing myself there’s some other room entirely in which I have to use the disk. A rather frustrating bit of design oversight, by my assessment.

Eventually, you’ll manage to track down Lott and save him from a hunter, where you’re unfortunately not given the choice of leaving him to get mauled by the monster (à la Rebecca in the original Resident Evil). It’s here where Ark finally gets some peace of mind, as Lott reveals the sequence of events leading up to his amnesia: Ark had actually come to Sheena Island at the request of no less than his close personal friend, Leon S. Kennedy (Wow! Ark must be cool, then!), in order to investigate Umbrella’s operations there. In the process, Ark had assumed the identity of Vincent in order to press the inhabitants (including the disgruntled Andy) for information, which Lott had observed and reported directly to the real Vincent — an act which Lott was under the impression Ark would want to kill him for. As it turns out, the real Vincent is kind of an asshole (as you might expect from an Umbrella executive), who in the past months had already been dealing with pressure from his employer; following an incident where he ordered a group of prisoners executed [and staged as committing mass suicide] after their attempting an escape, thereby risking exposing Umbrella’s human trafficking operations for gathering live biological materials and test subjects (primarily adolescents) to the public. Now with a private investigator poking around and presenting the threat of uncovering the whole sordid affair, Vincent takes this opportunity to deliberately cause a viral outbreak on the island and orchestrate its inevitable destruction; thereby wiping out all the evidence of his wrongdoings, and hoping to get back on Umbrella’s good graces. This ultimately leads to Ark confronting Vincent in his office, a scuffle ensuing [in which Vincent grabs Ark’s dog tags], an attempted escape by helicopter, and the resulting crash that sets off the events of the game. Certainly an interesting reveal, if not one that you can easily intuit most of the key details of beforehand.

True to formula, this moment of revelation is immediately followed by a “self-destruct sequence” activating, ostensibly putting ten minutes on the clock for you to stage your final escape. Oddly, there’s no actual timer on-screen to help visualize this threat, as there’s also no actual time limit ticking down as you proceed with the remainder of the game. Ark sends Lott off to go grab his sister and get back to the factory – which, if there really were just ten minutes to make that happen, seems logistically and physically impossible – while you work to secure a means for your actual escape. It’s during this final sequence in which you finally get the pay-off for your second choice of route in the game — when you are confronted at gunpoint by either Vincent, Andy, or the commander of the Cleaners. Each of them have their own bone to pick with you; where Vincent is obviously upset about your interference in his plans, Andy still believes that you’re Vincent (and therefore a murderous asshole), and the Cleaner leader needs you dead in order to complete his job. But just before you can actually confront any one of these given antagonists in a climactic showdown, they will all wind up getting stabbed through the back by an even more imposing villain: The ‘Hypnos-T Type Tyrant’ — the culmination of Vincent’s experiments on the Tyrant-type B.O.W. template, ultimately serving as your final boss regardless of whichever permutation of routes you may have taken to get here. But before we move too far past it, let’s take a moment in memorial for poor Andy Holland: A dude who’s only sin was not being able to figure out that Ark wasn’t Vincent, and having a somewhat maniacal laugh. The fact that he’s made to occupy one of the antagonist slots here and get the “karmic justice” treatment is honestly kind of wild if you think about it, seeing as he’s actually something of a good guy — a man on a righteous mission to track down and kill the architect of Sheena Island’s demise. The world of Resident Evil is truly a cruel and unforgiving one.

In any case, the Hypnos Tyrant behaves much the same as the original Resident Evil’s model of T-002 Tyrant, complete with swiping claw attacks and the requisite follow-up mutations. Knocking him out the first time is a relatively simple task, where the cramped quarters of the hallway that you face him in present the only real risk in the face of his highly telegraphed [and still easily dodgeable] attacks. Of course, Ark makes the mistake of not checking to see if he’s well and truly dead before running off, which sees the Tyrant getting right back up and evolving into his second form in a particularly grainy follow-up cutscene. You’ll still have a few more rooms to clear; including a hallway with a dozen doors that burst open to reveal either cleaners or Mr. Xs (or in some cases, no enemies at all?), and a station for an underground train where you’ll find Lott and Lily somehow already waiting for you. On manually activating the transport, you’ll find yourself suddenly surrounded by enemies (of some predetermined sort) who certainly weren’t there a second ago, attempting to bar you from getting onboard your ride out. God help you if the game decides to pick out a Cleaner squad for this screen, as a number of them will be positioned atop an overhead bridge — a perfect sniping spot for them, where your inability to manually look up and down will prevent you from easily being able to prioritize them (if you can even spot them in the first place). Trying to use the lock-on button will cast your gaze in their general direction, but getting shot by them before you can beat them to the draw means having your aim automatically center back toward eye-level, effectively forcing a deadly loop wherein the time it takes for you to aim is matched by how quickly your foes can ready and fire. I take back what I said about the alligator fight earlier: This is the actual hardest encounter in the game.

You can probably predict what’s in store for you past this final screen of standard enemies: You step off the train, start walking toward a helicopter, and are suddenly set upon by the mutated form of the Hypnos-T Tyrant — your last obstacle in the way of escape, and the final boss presented by the game. Given the width of a helipad to contend against the monster, you should be able to effectively dodge his distance-closing attacks and re-establish the necessary space needed to get your own shots in on him. If you’ve been hoarding ammo for the likes of the Magnum and Grenade Launcher, there’s no time like the present to dump them all into the poor lunk. Eventually, he’ll mutate again mid-fight, and come at you with an arsenal of more aggressive attacks. But with any luck at all (and maybe a few health items you managed to save for this point), you should prevail, and get onboard that helicopter with scant seconds to spare. Cue a final FMV cutscene, in which it turns out that the damned Tyrant has caught a ride on your escape vehicle, to which Ark promptly responds by firing an onboard missile launching itself and the monster a safe distance away before detonating — much the same as the island exploding in the distance behind you. With everyone and everything Lott and Lily have ever known having now been evaporated, an oddly chipper Lott asks “What are we gonna do, mister?” Chuckling to himself, an equally chipper Ark responds “I don’t know. But don’t worry: We can fly as long as we have fuel.” And where this would be a spot for a perfect comedic beat where the helicopter suddenly runs out of fuel and immediately plummets into the ocean below, the game instead chooses to end here on an ostensibly optimistic note.

And so, your playthrough concludes – likely to have run you roughly an hour’s playtime – and you’re awarded a letter grade based on your performance; where maintaining an accuracy above 85%, completing your run in under an hour and a half, and not using ‘First Aid Sprays’ seem to be the key determining factors in nabbing that elusive ‘S’ rank. With your rank having been presented, you’re now finally able to save your game — something you’ll have found yourself unable to do within the course of gameplay itself.***  The expectation is that you’re meant to clear a playthrough of Gun Survivor in a single sitting – much the same as a proper arcade game – and that starting a new playthrough from your established save file serves as your means of retaining the collectible weapons and ammo you may have accrued along your route — the additional expectation being that you’d actually want to replay the game multiple times over. Reckon this is the point in the article where we should judge just how compelling that replay incentive is! Or – as the case may be for some – whether or not it’s even worth playing Resident Evil Survivor in the first place? I think the answer to the latter question is gonna depend on how precious you hold the “classic” style of Resident Evil to your heart, your tolerance for rail shooter-type games, and your patience when it comes to action games that require stopping dead in your tracks in order to attack enemies. Honestly, I think that last bit might be the most contentious factor of them all — the thing that throws most folk off who expect Gun Survivor to play like a traditional first-person shooter, and instead find themselves having to constantly start and stop moving in order to engage with the shooting mechanics.

Now, you may realize that Resident Evil 4 released just a few years after Gun Survivor, and implements effectively the same system of stopping in place to shoot. We’ve pretty much all come to accept that mechanical concession in the case of that game. So, what makes the same limitation more egregious in the context of Gun Survivor? Well, for one thing: Resident Evil 4 is Resident Evil 4, and widely regarded as one of the most masterfully designed video games of the past two decades; whereas Gun Survivor is admittedly far rougher around its edges, and devoid of much of the meticulous balance and mechanical polish that its successor was benefit to. For another: Resident Evil 4 is a game with much more variety driving [and dividing up] its action, between the variety of weapons and combat environments and other systems at play. Gun Survivor stripping the Resident Evil formula down to its bare-most essentials means there’s simply less to break up its combat gameplay, and that the shooting itself is just as straightforward / devoid of frills. I think that the move to first-person perspective comes loaded with player expectations for how that style of game should play, where your point of view should lend itself to more fluid movement and run-and-gun engagements. Resident Evil 4 couching itself in a third-person perspective, by contrast, seems to get away with the same methodical approach to shooting; perhaps due to a different set of expectations for what a third-person shooter should entail? That’s a genre which is more commonly associated with the “cover shooter” school of design, where your movement is effectively interrupted on a similarly constant basis as you duck into and pop out of protective encampments. Even if Resident Evil 4 rarely has you utilizing scenery as cover, I think there’s something to the idea that different perspectives compel different expectations for how the pace and momentum of gameplay should flow.

It must also be said that Gun Survivor is simply a far less engaging and stimulating game compared to its more evolved and exciting sibling. It’s a game which I have to admire for its attempt at incorporating rail shooter style hooks within a decidedly off-rail FPS, but where it’s clear that the combination doesn’t come together completely cohesively here. Past a certain point, even Tose must’ve realized how poorly matched their stop-and-shoot system was with the full 3D environments they were designing, and understood that they had compromised movement and perspective to a degree that they couldn’t easily walk back or correct. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was some sort of full-on “George Lucas moment” somewhere along the development process: A realization that the team “may have gone too far in a few places,” and that while it was too late for the control scheme to be completely undone / reworked, they could at least attempt to “diminish the effects of it.” Perhaps, then, they may have reached the same conclusion as ol’ Georgy himself: The whole game would have to be substantially slowed down and streamlined. In the case of a first-person shooter, this would mean reducing the speed and aggression of enemies, to the point that many of them are rendered completely toothless and ineffective. And in order to make up for your limited field of view? They decided to implement a ridiculous, easily exploitable system in which most enemies aren’t allowed to damage you from outside your forward-facing vision. This includes Cleaners who curiously hesitate to shoot a man in the back, lickers and hunters who insist on jumping in front of you so that you can look them in the eye, and giant spiders who just seem to break down completely. Even the mighty Mr. Xs seem to respect your right to face your executioner, and will outright refuse to attack if you give them your back. This means that by simply standing in front of [and facing toward] a wall – where enemies aren’t able to circle around into your vision – you will become effectively invincible. I swear that I am not making this up, and that I have absolutely no idea how this was never scrutinized or remedied during play testing.

About the only exception I found to this rule actually comes with the standard zombies, surprisingly enough: They still won’t be able to damage you if they can’t make direct eye contact, so instead they’ll grab you and spin you in place — make it so that you’re looking straight at them and they are consequently able to follow up with an attack. The thing is, they wait a full second before actually proceeding to lunge or swipe at you, which means that you can easily backstep at this point to avoid any form of consequence. Put yourself in the middle of a horde of zombies (and by “horde” I mean the game’s apparent maximum of five enemies simultaneously on-screen), and you can actually game the mechanic so that you’re able to spin in place in perpetuity without actually taking damage — so long as you’re showing your back to whichever enemy is queued up to attack you next. Have any of y’all ever play The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct? No, just me? Maybe I should write an article on that one some time soon… Anyway, that game got a lot of flak for having a very similar system of zombies grabbing [but not immediately damaging] you from behind, and being constantly spun around when surrounded. But where that game forced you into a circuit of consecutive QTEs in order to fight your way out, Gun Survivor graciously gives you that full second to react in whichever way you deem fit. Most folk will probably just use the opportunity to quickly dispatch the handsy zombie. Maybe you’ll decide to just turn around and get grabbed again, and see how long you can keep up the loop? Who’s to say! All that can be said for sure is, this whole system serves to illustrate the egregious concession made on Tose’s part: The fear that players might get frustrated by being damaged by unseen enemies clearly led them to overreact, and to implement AI behaviors which can inadvertently render much of the game’s challenge completely moot.

Now, is one exploitable mechanic enough to ruin the whole game? Certainly not: You can simply choose not to take advantage of it, or just as readily accept it as an available means of getting yourself out of a jam. I choose to highlight it as an example of the fact that Gun Survivor is a little rough around its edges — that Tose weren’t quite up to the same level of polish or thoughtful design as Capcom were at this point. This is further evidenced by a number of presentational faux paus, mainly relating to the game’s rather lacklustre cutscenes: Where it comes to in-engine cutscenes, you can expect awkward long pauses between cuts, as well as a recurring tendency for enemies to comedically walk in place for several seconds when transitioning back to gameplay. Where it comes to pre-rendered video, Tose evidently didn’t have the budget / animating talent of Capcom in order to produce full-motion video, and instead were made to leverage existing game models and environments to stage their scenes; where despite the consistency that should come with that, poor recording quality / compression results in all these videos bearing an unpleasant grainy quality to them. It leaves you to wonder what stopped Tose from just presenting all of their cutscenes in-engine, when the end result of their pre-render process is so clearly inferior? It doesn’t seem to be on account of any unique graphical assets or complex animation routines contained within, or the use of too many simultaneous moving models which might’ve potentially caused in-engine slowdown. I’m sure there’s some sort of logical technical reason for it, but good luck getting anyone at Tose to explain it all.

I suppose that leaves the actual gameplay graphics to nitpick now. Except, I’m not going to: For the most part, I think they’re great, and serve as a perfect encapsulation of the PlayStation aesthetic! The game seems to take many of the existing monster models from Resident Evil 2 and 3 and transplants them into nicely detailed full 3D environments, where the end result is a lavishly detailed affair through and through. The variety of unique locations you’ll visit is matched only by how many “lived-in” touches they manage to cram into them, and it makes for a genuinely haunting trek through a city abandoned and beyond. Gun Survivor may not bring you a classic puzzle-box mansion to solve for, but it at least compares nicely to the war-torn streets of Raccoon City as detailed in 2 and 3‘s pre-rendered backdrops. I dare say that the game even stacks up well against Code: Veronica and Capcom’s initial attempt to translate their level design into that full 3D space, albeit lacking in the screen and texture resolutions needed to make its finer details truly discernible. But hey, that’s just part of the charm of the original PlayStation, if you ask me: Developers doing the best they could within shockingly sparse limitations, and managing to punch well above their perceived weight class. Plus, there’s lots of neat little touches in how the UI presents itself, including different ammunition types behaving differently within the on-screen ammo counter; where spent shell casings will eject out of the bounding box, and revolver brass will remain burst and deformed until you dump your cylinder. Little touches like this go a long way in demonstrating how much thought a given developer is putting into their design, and how seriously they’re taking their weapon selection.

On the subject of weapons: I find the available assortment to be fairly satisfying, where the alternative models of handgun definitely speak to an accomodation for player preference and want to round out your choices. Whether you’re the sort to pull the trigger quick as you can and dump magazines at a rapid pace, or are more inclined to spend an enforced downtime between shots relining your sights; you’re likely to find a pistol that suits your needs, and feel comfortable switching between the beefier weapons on offer. Ammo scarcity does become a factor when accounting for certain grenade rounds and magnum ammo (handguns all pack infinite reserves, while the game is content to send plenty of shotgun shells your way), but that’s how it should be when dealing with more powerful weapons in a survival horror-esque scenarios. My only complaint with the assortment is that it could’ve stood to represent a couple more classes of firearm: Maybe an alternate shotgun in double-barrel configuration? A submachine gun certainly could’ve been possible, as well as some sort of flamethrower operating on a similar held-trigger principle. Hell, toss in Claire’s bolt gun for good measure, for those who enjoy their zombies skewered. Ultimately though, what weapons you do get get the job done, even as they’re not particularly satisfying in terms of feedback: There’s nothing in the way of enemy dismemberment to factor into strategic shot placement (headshots do result in dealing critical damage, though) or otherwise amuse you with naughty bits of gore, and the simulated recoil on the magnum – wherein the screen shakes for half a second after firing a shot – is more jarring than it is immersive. My final shooting nitpick is the fact that you can’t move the camera up or down while aiming, making it difficult to deal with the rare aerial enemy or knee-high creature nipping at your toes; but the game rarely chooses to challenge you in those ways to begin with, so the actual effect on gameplay is minimal.

Still, I have to wonder if the shooting – if the game at large, really – wouldn’t have been better served by committing completely to a rail shooter design? By which I mean putting the entire game on tracks, and doing away with any pretenses of exploration and positioning. Because if there’s one thing which really holds Gun Survivor back gameplay-wise, it’s how clunky and ultimately pointless its freedom of movement winds up serving players. Personally, I don’t mind it, and actually enjoy the option of being able to outmaneuver enemies or keep them at a distance. But it’s also a system which I can easily imagine (and also find testimonial evidence) most players not taking advantage of, or otherwise finding to be too stiff to want to engage with. It’s an input method which feels particularly at odds / unintuitive with the use of a light gun, and which could theoretically be stripped from the game without having to significantly alter or redesign any of its level design: In instances where a player has to pick up a key item or interact with the environment, the track could come to a stop facing toward the given interactable, and have the player point and shoot at what it is they’re meant to take notice of. In the same way, inventory items and pick-ups could have the player’s view orient toward them as they pass them by, and similarly have them shoot at them in order to pick them up. And when it comes to the branching paths, having simple pop-up prompts where the player can select from a set of choices would’ve worked plenty well, if not establishing a system where your actions in combat (how quickly you kill enemies or which bits of scenery you destroy) ultimately determine which route is selected for you. These are mechanics which would’ve already been present in rail shooters that Capcom / Tose could’ve used as precedent / reference, and which serve to maintain the forward momentum of a game while still imparting a feeling of environmental exploration and interaction.

Of course, I’m sure those concepts would’ve been proposed and explored during Gun Survivor’s development, but likely rejected after being deemed too significant a departure from “what makes Resident Evil feel like Resident Evil.” And that is ultimately the overarching issue that holds Gun Survivor back from making more intuitive design decisions or establishing a more unique identity: A dogmatic devotion to keeping in line with series conventions, even as they make little sense in the new context of a first-person shooter. The end result is a collection of compromises and half-measures put in place to keep the game “true” to Resident Evil tradition, which collectively serve to hinder the game as a standalone product. That isn’t to say that Gun Survivor is without its charms and merits, but that it’s simply restricted in its potential ambitions — stifled in its creative exploration and expression. And what makes it so frustrating is the fact that this way of thinking is inherently flawed, as it misses the obvious truth of the matter: As long as the game still centered around zombie shooting at its core, it would’ve still remained totally recognizable and accepted as a Resident Evil game by most players! And as for the franchise purists who still wish the series was pumping out fixed-camera entries to this very day, there’s no winning them over: The very moment Gun Survivor was decided to take place from a first-person perspective, those folk had already written the game off! No number of familiar gameplay elements or shoehorned-in systems is gonna convince that audience that the emphasis on first-person shooting could ever have its place in a “proper” Resident Evil game. (Wouldn’t it be funny if the more recent entries in the series embraced this same perspective shift, and wound up being some of the most critically and financially successful installments in the franchise’s history?) As such, all my recommendations as to how the game could’ve been potentially improved deal in deviating that much further from the constraints of tradition.

With that being said, my first suggestion would be to put the game entirely on rails as I was suggesting just a minute ago. While Tose obviously wouldn’t have Umbrella Chronicles as reference for a masterclass in immersive rail shooter design, I like to imagine them landing on many of the same decisions that title would ultimately make in terms of pacing and interactivity. Having A and B on the GunCom cycle between your available weapons and healing items would serve as an intuitive and welcome alternative from having to manage the cumbersome inventory screen, and having files hidden throughout the stages to be read later at your own convenience (rather than the classic style of immediately opening them up and paging through them on the spot) would play far better with the game’s momentum. Perhaps more importantly, putting the game on rails would allow Ark to move through screens much quicker in general — always placed on the most direct path through a room, and made to sprint from point to point at a far speedier clip (as seen in most rail shooters). The fact that this approach would also cut down on tedious bits of backtracking and further streamline the already simple bits of puzzle-solving are added bonuses. All told, putting the game on rails would’ve prevented all the complaints about clunky movement control and sluggish game pace, and likely given Tose more time and incentive to further tighten up the experience of aiming and shooting — emphasizing and improving on what is clearly the game’s strong suit.

You know what other rail shooter staple Gun Survivor could’ve benefitted from incorporating? Saveable and / or accidentally shootable civilians. Sure, the idea of there being survivors left to save isn’t necessarily in keeping with Resident Evil tradition — where everyone in the vicinity of a zombie outbreak who’s not affiliated with S.T.A.R.S. or Umbrella [by at least one degree of separation] is typically already dead prior to a given game even beginning. (Hell, the odds barely improve even if you can claim direct employment.) And given that Gun Survivor’s ending spells doom for all of Sheena Island’s inhabitants in either case, maybe the gesture of “rescuing” them doesn’t actually amount to much, all told? But given the nature of the game’s urban locations and the recency of the T-Virus’ dispersal among the populace, you’d expect to see at least a handful of the as-of-yet uninfected attempting to survive. If helping to defend them from encroaching zombies could reward you with additional ammo and healing items, or possibly serve to determine your route in an on-rails format; it’d have made for an interesting addition to the gameplay, and one that makes sense in the context of a populated city and a guilt-ridden Ark attempting to do some good. And if one should happen to inadvertently shoot a hapless civilian while attempting to protect them, the traditional mechanic of damage done to the player could be interpreted as the further deterioration of Ark’s fragile psyche or something. Whatever could’ve given Capcom / Tose an excuse to add some more variety to the game’s combat encounters, or help to establish higher stakes for speedy and accurate shooting. And who cares if it would’ve invited yet more comparisons to Sega’s competing light gun titles? We’re talking about a game centered on one-man war against the scientifically-designed undead wreaking havoc on a European township: We’re already treading heavy on The House of the Dead 2’s turf, here.

The most major change I envision though (aside from putting the whole game on rails) would probably do the least in fixing presumed “issues” with the game, but would potentially serve to give the game a unique marketing hook: Adding more in the way of branching paths, and having their impact on the game’s action and narrative be that much more significant. When I started replaying the game for this article, I was under a years-old impression that the paths you chose had an impact on what enemies would spawn in which locations, where the choice of your antagonist also dictated what monsters were more likely to populate screens across the rest of the game. Of course, the truth of the matter is that the “random” enemy arrangements you encounter are truly random — determined by unseen number selection at the moment before you open the door to a new room. By my estimation, the system I had originally imagined would’ve made for a far more novel and replayable experience; where players would feel compelled to make note of how different paths have measurable effects on the rest of their playthrough, and possibly determine to “mix and match” different enemy and route permutations to their preferences (or simply to sate their completionist tendencies). At the same time, having a more measurable impact on the narrative other than swapping out which interchangeable antagonist appears in the game’s climactic cutscene would’ve been much appreciated: Having players actually face off against the character in question would make that choice feel far more significant, and potentially allow for a distribution of story beats and readable files that build up to that fated encounter. As it stands, the game dedicates almost all its files and revelations to vilifying Vincent as much as possible, which winds up feeling like wasted build-up if it’s either Andy or the Cleaner squad commander you wind up running into during your escape.

It feels as if the game [as it stands] is designed around a “Vincent route,” where the number of Mr. Xs it invariably throws at you feels like his personal handiwork, and the singular provided ending feels like the best one possible (in the context of a Resident Evil game). But what if the alternate antagonists could additionally determine how the game’s final stretch plays out? If you instead spent a playthrough on a “Cleaner route” dealing mostly with gun-toting baddies at every other turn, and overhearing conversations about the brutal tactics of their leader; it could build up to an exciting confrontation where the commander sics waves of his units against you, as you look for brief opportunities to take shots at the boss himself. You could even have it factor into the ending as well: The helicopter you and the kids escape on is the same one you saw the commander arriving on the scene with earlier in the game, and it turns out that you’re automatically set to fly straight back to Umbrella HQ for an unresolved cliffhanger and deliberately disheartening ending. I also imagine an “Andy route” playing out as a far more tragic affair: An “easier” path you get put on for making bad choices / doing poorly in combat, where you never get to encounter Lott and don’t even get told about the truth of your identity. In confronting Andy toward the end of the game, Ark would still believe he’s the villainous Vincent attempting to redeem himself, and feel conflicted about having to defend himself against the disgruntled sewer worker. For an extra bit of added guilt, said battle could be made trivial as well; where Andy can be taken down in as few as one or two shots, and grant you no satisfaction in striking him down. If we wanna go full-on “Bad End” here: Have the final battle against the Hypnos-T Tyrant serve as Ark’s self-sacrifice — a distraction he provides so that the kids he’s observed from a distance [but never gotten a chance to talk to] can make their own escape safely. (That’d probably wind up being the “canon” ending in the long-run of series continuity.)

There is one more consideration here I feel is worth making: The idea of releasing Resident Evil Survivor as an arcade cabinet first, with plans in mind for a PlayStation version afterward. If they went the route of fully on-rails shooting in a way like I envisioned, and slapped a constantly ticking timer on the screen (à la Time Crisis) to motivate that much quicker item-hunting / puzzle solving, there’s no reason that Gun Survivor couldn’t have worked within that more restrictive arcade format. For its later PlayStation release then, the game could benefit from the addition of additional console-exclusive game modes; such as a take on the classic ‘Arrange’ mode where rooms and items are all shuffled around, or a version of ‘Extreme Battle’ where you’re given a set amount of weapons and ammo to survive a particularly difficult stretch of set encounters. Hell, this would’ve been a great opportunity to introduce time attack and boss rush modes to the series, if they just wanted to keep things simple and standard. Now, you may be asking: Would releasing a version of Resident Evil Survivor for arcades have been a financially practical / successful venture for Capcom? To that question I can only respond, “Who’s to say?” I just think it would’ve made for a neat little experiment in testing the franchise’s reach and brand recognition, and possibly informed the game’s design in such a way that the eventual PlayStation release would have benefited from. Plus, I would love to be able to see dusty old Gun Survivor machines out in the wild to this very day — sandwiched between the equally ill-maintained House of the Dead 2 & 3 machines that seem to populate every surviving American arcade.

Of course, the Resident Evil Survivor we got is the one we have — the version of the game we’ll continue to refer to as the franchise’s original “black sheep” for the decades to come. And truth be told, I’m plenty content with it in its retail released form: Imperfect as it may be, it succeeds well enough in transplanting the ideas established by the then-trilogy of survival horror titles into a unique first-person vessel. It represents a Tose as eager to impress consumers as they are to satisfy their client, between impressive visuals and gameplay designed to leverage an underutilized system peripheral (at least for those outside of North America). Where its fatal flaw is its publisher’s stubborn refusal to let it deviate too far from the comfort of series conventions, these imposed limitations are also what make it such a unique entry in its genre — a novel convergence of design elements taken from survival horror and on-rails shooters, merged within the conceit of a free-moving FPS. As I said earlier, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and some Resi purists seem to hate it for daring to be even slightly different than what they’re used to. But for those who can tolerate a bit of jankiness, and who enjoy the simple satisfaction of squeezing a trigger at shambling murder monsters, there’s genuine fun to be had on scenic Sheena Island.

Having said all that, there is one last problem to address here: While the PlayStation may have been far and away the most popular console of the fifth generation, not everyone may have had access to the system. Namely, Chinese and Taiwanese citizens would’ve been subject to a full-on ban on the sale of video game consoles in-country, as established in the year 2000 (and only lifted as recently as 2014).^[10] How were players in that region of the world supposed to get their zombie-shooting fix? As it turns out, they would be in luck: Two years after Resident Evil Survivor’s release in North America – on September 7th, 2002 – Capcom would bring the game back East, stopping short of the Sea of Japan in order to deliver a version for those markets. And to circumvent their lack of dedicated game consoles on which to play the game, they’d do them the favor of porting it to a platform more readily available (ostensibly): Home computers running Windows 2000. Never mind the fact that Windows PCs in China and Taiwan were actually something of a rarity, following Microsoft’s own fiascos with the Chinese government (during which time ‘Red Flag Linux’ became the official operating system of the ministry):^[11] This version of the game would still be allowed to release, for the benefit of anyone actually capable of running it. And for those who could, there would be some unique changes to observe within.

** Apparently, these Cleaners are officially known as either the ‘Undertaker Unit’ or ‘Trash Sweepers’ according to online sources, which seem to cite the official Japanese strategy guide. That said, they’re never actually referred to as such in-game [as far as I can gather], and are only acknowledged by their ‘Cleaners’ moniker in dialogue (between Vincent, Andy, and Ark acknowledging them as such). And so, I reckon it’s best practice for me to continue referring to them in the same way, for the sake of consistency with the game itself… and also because 99.99% of players will never read that expanded lore, and therefore have no clue about any of this apparent naming confusion. Of course, try telling that to the dorks at Fandom’s ‘Resident Evil Wiki,’ who insist on exclusively referring to them as the Undertaker Unit [or individually as ‘Under Takers’].

*** There actually is a way to save mid-game. But it involves dying, running out of continues (or electing not to use them), and being allowed to save your collected weapons and ammo at that point in the run. Loading that save will still start you from the beginning of the game just the same. With this in mind: It is possible to deliberately die after picking up your first route-exclusive Handgun, doing the same after collecting the second, and proceeding to play through your third playthrough after grabbing the third. In that way, you can theoretically obtain all the weapons there are to collect without having to complete the whole game three times in a row. Of course, you’ll be missing out on actually experiencing the alternate routes and random permutation (not to mention the collectible files), but maybe you’re the sort who doesn’t care to complete games that thoroughly? Oh, how I wish I could switch off my own compulsions and be content to leave a game half-finished…

“Everyone and Everything Must Be Cleansed!”

“You had to go and screw it all up!
Now, you’re going to pay!”
Chinese / Taiwanese release front cover.

First things first, a point of transparency: I don’t actually own an authentic model of Chinese home computer from around the era of Biohazard Gun Survivor’s Windows release. Somehow, I don’t imagine many other English-speaking gamers do, either. What I do have on-hand is a Windows XP desktop on which I was able to install and run the game, which is gonna have to serve as “close enough.” That being said, there’s the chance that the jump forward in OS iterations may responsible for some number of unintended game behaviors — widespread issues for most who attempt to play this version of the game in the modern day, and which have led to the port being regarded as one of the most technically incompetent and buggy video game conversions of all time. How much of this is simply owed to the game being run on hardware setups it was never intended for is unclear, where there’s little documentation or reference footage of the game being made to run on a closer equivalent to a target machine. With that being said, I’m inclined to believe that several of the more egregious issues with the game’s performance and rendering are consistent with what a Chinese-region player would’ve encountered when the game was still contemporary, and that Capcom did put out what is inherently a pretty busted piece of software. Christ, they still didn’t have this Windows shit figured out in time for Resident Evil 4’s original PC release in 2007 — where they somehow managed to launch that one without mouse support or functional lighting effects! But alas, I digress.

At its core, Biohazard Gun Survivor on PC is much the same game we already know and love (?), now made to run on theoretically more powerful computer hardware. It benefits from potentially higher screen resolutions, DirectX 8.1 rendering, and the ability to use your mouse in order to aim. As a matter of fact, the use of a mouse in conjunction with a keyboard opens up the possibility for a new control scheme — one which actually enables you to aim and shoot while simultaneously moving! This is actually a pretty big deal, as it brings the game closer in line (though obviously not completely) with more traditional first-person shooter controls. No more having to stop in place to shoot: Now you can fire your weapon while moving forwards and backwards, turning in place, or any other combination of directional input you can conceive. (Still no strafing though, sadly.) And in doing so, you’ll quickly discover a truth of Gun Survivor’s design: The game was absolutely not meant to support this freedom of movement during combat, and combat is therefore rendered a total triviality for it. Discovering that you can march right up to a Mr. X while dumping handgun magazines into them and watching them fall to the ground by the time you reach them really puts the whole game in a new perspective, as does backstepping your way out of every enemy attack while still simultaneously pumping them full of bullets. Gun Survivor may have already been fairly easy as it already stood, but this is a whole other level of inconsequential hazards — a true experiment in game imbalance.

With that being said, the game sure is more fun for it! Being able to control the game somewhat more closely to a standard FPS does wonders for its pacing, and makes its bits of backtracking and side room exploration far more tolerable — as well as making combat feel generally more exciting, and allowing you to more fully enjoy the fast-firing handguns. I spent pretty much the entirety of my playthrough just equipping the CZ75 (Handgun B), draining its low-power rounds as quickly as I could click.  And where this would prove almost entirely impractical in the context of the original game – where its lack of stopping power invariably meant eating enemy attacks – the ability to backstep away from damage while still unloading on baddies now makes it a totally viable option. Focusing on it as my primary weapon also prevented me from just playing the entire game as a forward march, where more powerful weapons would be likely to eliminate any need to ever stop moving forward. You’ll have to self-impose a handicap yourself with the lower-power handguns if you want to engage at all with any semblance of combat tactics and positioning, or otherwise embrace this version of the game as a simulation of what it must feel like to be an unstoppable juggernaut. In either case, it’ll certainly remedy whatever hang-ups you might have about the tedium of stop-and-shoot gunplay — though you can always choose to stand in place while shooting if you don’t particularly mind it. But all this newfound freedom comes at a price, of course.

For starters, there’s the absolute mess that’s made of the game’s audio. For those unaware, the PlayStation rarely leveraged full streaming audio files (MP3s / WAVs / etc.) for its music, instead opting for chip-driven playback similar to MIDI audio — where soundtables consisting of different digital “instruments” and samples are loaded and able to produce different notes on cue, as called for by what are effectively “music sheet” files comprising the musical arrangements composed for a given game. The benefit of this approach is the ability to save metric tons of space by not having to stuff the CD-ROM full with pre-recorded musical tracks taking up potentially hundreds of megabytes of data, and to instead be able to fit theoretically hundreds of songs in their place. The problem is, the formatting utilized on the console doesn’t directly translate to PC MIDI tables and the like, and so a time-pressed developer performing a porting job may often elect for the worst possible alternative: Recording a playback of the game’s original music, and plugging the resulting audio stream into the new version. Gun Survivor illustrates the flaws in this approach, as the resulting music sounds like it was literally recorded by a microphone pressed up against a set of TV speakers — hollow, heavily-compressed, and downright difficult to listen to. As an added negative, none of it loops properly or smoothly transitions from track to track. All in all, the PC port does composer Shiro Kohmoto’s musical arrangements dirty, and similarly destroys the atmosphere established by the game’s more ambient soundscapes. At the very least, sound effects and voice samples seem to make the transition largely unaffected.

Where I praised Gun Survivor on PlayStation as being graphically impressive for its given specs, the game does not hold up at all with the jump to higher resolutions and smoothed 3D rendering. Despite importing the same graphical assets, Gun Survivor on PC is remarkably ugly — a victim of non-toggleable bilinear filtering (perhaps the ugliest graphic interpolation method ever devised), with blurry upscaling on its UI elements and far less charm to its tiny texture maps. This is all compounded by the removal of the original game’s already scant few lighting effects, which leaves the game looking generally flat and tinged in an unflattering shade of green. Sprites relying on transparency effects [such as foliage and scenery objects] take on rough edges with unseemly black outlines, which were either not present or far less noticeable on the PlayStation front. The pre-rendered cutscenes, for their part, appear even grainier and compressed than they originally did on consoles; clearly as a result of not being re-rendered at higher resolutions, and instead relying on further compression being run on the existing 320×240 pixel video files. With the presence of new Chinese-language subtitles overlaid on the screen in dialogue events (remember that the voice acting remains in English, thereby necessitating these subtitles for those not versed in the language), it’s likely that they had to run another render pass on the low-res videos in order to hard-code the subtitles into them (making them a permanent part of said video files), which would’ve led to already-compressed footage losing further data and fidelity. In a word, it’s all pretty hideous, and not in the cool way that a particularly grotesque Umbrella-manufactured monster might be.

As a further consequence of how sloppily the game appears to have been ported, a lot of the animations seem to play as completely broken. One of the most obvious examples of this are door opening animations, which play out at an uncapped framerate and typically only last a fraction of a second — a potential consequence of faster load times meaning that these scene transitions are no longer tied to behind-the-scenes memory-swapping operations. Where a common complaint with regards to the original release seems to be with how several animation states don’t properly link together (such as downed zombies suddenly springing back to their feet when shot), this issue is clearly multiplied by a factor of a hundred on PC; where tracking issues lead to oddly craned necks, timings based on movement across the screen are totally out of sync, and enemies are just generally liable to behave in a variety of odd ways. You’ll often find enemies stuck running in place due to collision issues, where they can additionally hover above the ground due to either erroneous placement or some other issue tied to their programming routines. But perhaps the most confounding issue you may run into are duplicated enemies: Instances where models for an enemy are loaded multiple times over, operating in sync with one another to where they take damage and die all at the same time. Luckily, they don’t seem to be able to multiply their collective attack power in this configuration, so the glitch is at least benign in that sense. Also, some of these clone enemies which spawn in don’t actually appear to be harmable (or able to attack you, for their part), which just further adds to the confusion for unwitting players. All this can make for some incredibly jarring sights over the course of a playthrough, and could even potentially affect performance on a lower-end machine.

All in all, Biohazard Gun Survivor on PC is clearly the worst version of the game from a presentational and mechanical depth standpoint. The novelty of getting to run and gun can be fun, but it’s simply not worth it to have to deal with a version of the game which now appears to be fundamentally broken across every aspect of its design. While I’m willing to forgive a fair bit of jank in a video game – hell, I often find it downright endearing – the level of it on display here is honestly beyond the pale. It all affects gameplay to the point of feeling entirely unfinished — a clear violation of the consumer expectation that the game they’re purchasing should at least be a largely functional product. Where something like the duplicate enemies bug is amusing from an outside / retrospective perspective, actually having to problem-solve while playing the game in order to figure out if your installation is somehow broken / if the game is even completable past a particularly troubling screen is far less fun in the moment. There are no available details as to what studio actually handled the matter of bringing the PlayStation game to PC – whether it was Tose themselves, a Capcom team, or some outside contractor more integrated with the Chinese / Taiwanese market – but I can’t imagine the final product would’ve pleased the developers responsible for its original production. Evidently, the porting process necessitated that the game be reconstructed atop an entirely new engine, and it’s clear that not a great deal of care was taken into making sure that this new version of the game actually matched the source material in terms of how enemies were arranged and made to attack the player. It’s evidence that just because a game can directly copy graphical assets and environments, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will also behave precisely as they did in their original game.

If you should – for some reason – want to play this particular version of Gun Survivor for yourself, I wish you the best of luck: Where the disc image is easy enough to find online, the game absolutely will not run on modern versions of Windows (seemingly anything past Windows 7), no matter what compatibility settings you toss at it. Virtual machines also appear to struggle to interpret the game’s commands and output, which made them a no-go for me as well. Running the game on authentic older hardware will surely be your best bet, but even then its ability to actually execute seems largely hit or miss; where you’ll certainly have to trial and error different compatibility settings, ensure that your display resolution doesn’t prevent the game from launching, and pray that your GPU is compatible in the first place. And even with all this in place, you’re still left with a version of the game that seems to play at fluctuating speed and framerate consistency; where you’ll likely have to endure a whole lot of rapidly flashing UI elements, and cope with seemingly unresolvable screen-tearing. But if all that sounds like a fun challenge to you, might I suggest attempting to additionally install an available English fan translation designed by modder ‘ReiKaz?’ While purporting to translate all the Chinese language text back into English for the benefit of players more familiar with that language, my best attempts to run the game with this patch installed came up absolutely fruitless. I’d love to be able to ask ReiKaz just what in the hell sort of computer they’re able to run the game on, or to figure out what exactly their optional ‘Strange Phonecall’ add-on entails;** but it doesn’t look as though the forum they originate from is particularly active, or that they themselves have been actively maintaining the mod since 2019.

One last rumor I can take this opportunity to squash: I saw multiple online commentators speculating that this whole release was somehow a “bootleg” — an unofficial, pirate copy of the game designed within China to circumvent the PlayStation release’s unavailability. Folk have pointed to the fact that the release of this version was never acknowledged on Capcom’s official Japanese site for the game (long-since deprecated, but available on the Wayback Machine), which is a goofy argument considering that this site doesn’t acknowledge the European or North American releases either? In any case, there’s a fairly obvious tell that Capcom did release this version of the game officially, which puts this whole theory quickly to bed: The game’s box copy – the contents of which can be viewed online, thanks to a wonderful webpage I discovered titled ‘Crimson-Ceremony.net’ – all appears very much factory-pressed and official, to the point of including a survey card that could be mailed directly to Capcom providing feedback on the game. Something tells me a bootleg wouldn’t have gone through the effort of designing a feedback form meant for Capcom’s official mailbox? In any case, the fact of the matter is that Capcom stamped their name to this product; likely knowing full well how lacklustre its quality was, and believing that the Chinese / Taiwanese market would be so hard-up for first-person shooter games that they’d still readily accept it. I’d love to get a peek inside the included instruction manual to see if any additional developer credits are listed within, but its contents sadly have yet to be scanned and posted. Perhaps one day.

** I actually figured this out for myself some time after writing this portion of the article. From listening to the overwriting .WAV files that comprise this mod: It’s just a replacement for Andy’s voice audio during a pair in-game phone calls, where his calling you a killer is replaced by a mash-up of voice clips from the original Resident Evil arranged to sound like characters are having sex with each other. Classy.

“I Want You to Stop Performing Those Terrible Crimes, and Just Come Back Home!”

Resident Evil Survivor was positioned as something like a “budget title” with its North American launch, priced just $29.99 at launch (compared to the standard $49.99 price point for new PlayStation releases). Perhaps this was an acknowledgement or make-good for the fact that it had its light gun functionality removed, or that the short nature of a playthrough was perhaps worth less to the average consumer? More likely, it was simply a sign of the times: With the PlayStation 2 due to release Stateside in October of that year, the market for the fifth generation of consoles was preemptively winding down, and game prices were beginning to be adjusted to reflect that. For what it’s worth, Biohazard Gun Survivor had launched at the standard ¥5,800 MSRP in Japan, which I believe speaks to the difference that the eight months’ time between its Japanese and North American releases may have made. In either case, this lowered price point did little to massage review scores of the game emanating from English-speaking games outlets, who largely took to lambasting the release as the Resident Evil franchise’s first misfire — as not worthy of bearing the branding, and not worth however little of players’ time or money as it may have demanded.

GamePro’s ‘Major Mike’ Weigand saw fit to grade Gun Survivor as a 2.0 out of 5, coming in as one of the game’s lowest [contemporary] review scores among major outlets. By his estimation: “Survivor fails on almost every level. From the lame, unappealing story and the clumsy first-person shooter interface to laughable monsters, even rabid fans of the RE series will squirm through this one. […] Don’t be fooled by this one: Take ‘Resident Evil’ out of the title, and all you have left (besides the name of a hit TV show) is a below-average corridor shooter. The scariest thing about this game is how awful it is.”^[12] Doug Perry for IGN would rate the game as a 4 out of 10, and take the opportunity to seemingly denigrate the intellect of anyone who dated find entertainment in it: “Instead of gorgeous prerendered backgrounds and amazing creature models and kooky but sometimes awesome puzzles, players get the dummy version. In fact, you could say that Survivor is the ‘idiots’ version of the series. […] This is a campy, C-movie like formula rip-off of Resident Evil by the makers of Resident Evil. It’s a strange hybrid of Resident Evil ‘Survival Horror’ trimmings, without the best parts. And it’s not for the smart.”^[13] At the same time as they deride the title as being for the weak-minded, they confess that they “played all the way through the game and honestly, I have to admit, I was compelled to do so. Survivor, despite its cheap seduction as a Resident Evil game, isn’t all cheap eats. The classic formula is all there. Even though I knew it was there and didn’t want to buy into it, it still worked.”

GameSpot’s Ben Stahl would award the game a 4.1 out of 10 — marking a clear distinction between IGN and GameSpots’ evaluations. (You’ve gotta work hard to earn that extra 0.1 point.) Their review contains a particularly odd / obscure point of comparison: “Imagine a Resident Evil game that runs on the Echo Night engine, and you’ll get the picture. Survivor tries to be more than just a shooting game – it’s got an odd plotline featuring no major characters from any of the past games and some puzzle-solving elements – but at its core it’s a bland shooter that limits itself with a poorly designed control scheme.”^[14] In noting the game’s mash-up of seemingly disparate genres: “Resident Evil: Survivor tries its best to be a fusion of two drastically different genres, and it unfortunately limits itself with difficult control and tedious gameplay. There’s no real reward to playing Survivor, and the Resident Evil universe would be better off without it.” As a point of contrast, we can look to PSXNation’s 76%-scoring review of Gun Survivor – the highest critical rating the game would receive – where reviewer JM Vargas opens with what reads as a genuinely regretful confession: “I’m faced, for the first time ever, with a Resident Evil game on PSX that I can’t shower with complements [sic] of being a ‘must buy’ or a ‘must own’ title. And yet, I can’t hold it against Capcom because it’s obvious that’s the way it intended its experimental shooter Resident Evil: Survivor to be perceived in the first place. […] There are enough satisfying nuggets of ‘survival horror turned Virtua Cop clone w/limited movement’ goodness to make this odd curiosity worth playing for most, and maybe even worth owning by the ‘RE’ fanatics.”^[15]

Now, I’d be remiss not to mention the fact that I’ve complimented Vargas’ prose before on this site — admiring his deep-cut fighting game references in his review for Fight Club on PS2, if I recall? And here we are again, as I feel compelled to point out something I really appreciated in his review of Gun Survivor; where he seems to be one of the few other folk who agrees with me that the movement controls are actually a boon to the game, and an innovation worthy of some distinction: “If you think that Survivor is just another mindless shooter like House of the Dead 2 or Time Crisis 2, [the] added mobility and freedom to maneuver within the environments of the targets, the control scheme will feel like an exhilarating attempt to break the monotony of most light-gun shooters. It’s with this latter mindset that I approached the control scheme of Survivor, and came away pleasantly surprised by how little I missed the light-gun control the game was originally intended to support. […] I’ll be raising holy hell if Sega doesn’t design its next Virtua Cop or House of the Dead shooter without incorporating (read: stealing) some of Capcom’s takes on the genre for the console version. Ditto for Namco and their Crisis franchise, as well as Konami and its Silent Scope sniper games.”^[15b] Where I may have to respectfully disagree and say that something like a Silent Scope definitely did not need tacked-on movement mechanics, I honestly kinda vibe with the rest of what he’s saying here. In the totally unlikely scenario that someone reading this knows where JM Vargas is today, and could be so kind as to send them this article: Hey JM! You seem like a cool dude. Shoot me an e-mail some time, maybe? I’d love to potentially interview you about the state of game reviewing in the late 90s / early aughts, and your bringing a clearly encyclopedic knowledge of the medium to your work.

According to the dubiously reliable VGChartz, Gun Survivor managed to sell approximately 710K copies across its PlayStation releases. While this would certainly represent the lowest point in sales for the franchise to that point, we have to understand what Capcom’s own expectations for the title likely were: With the next generation of console hardware already underway at the point of its launch, the game’s status as a non-numbered spin-off, and the presumed minimal budget allocated to both its development and its marketing; falling short of a million units was probably a possibility they had accepted for Gun Survivor. They were likely pretty content with the fact that it had even surpassed the half a million mark, and saw their original mission as accomplished: They had proven that a Resident Evil spin-off title could at least be commercially viable – driven largely by its brand recognition – even as its critical and consumer reception had been admittedly lukewarm. Moreover, it would’ve demonstrated to them that allowing third parties to helm development and the genre to be changed out were both viable options they could leverage in the future, so long as they were willing to allocate more in the way of production funding for them. Gun Survivor may not have risen to the sales of a traditional mainline entry, but it wasn’t a failure either. And with the feedback they received on where their spin-off installment fell short, they could better tailor future entries to deliver more in the way of what consumers wanted out of potential non-standard sequels.

Of course, Capcom didn’t really need Gun Survivor’s sales numbers to tell them this: The key theories would’ve all been proven just a month after Gun Survivor’s initial release, where the launch of Resident Evil – Code: Veronica on Sega’s Dreamcast (on February 3rd, 2000) would further demonstrate the commercial viability of a non-numbered franchise installment. Granted, its sales were somewhat hampered at first by the nature of its Dreamcast exclusivity – to where it would only manage 1.14 million units moved on the fledgling platform^[16] – but its eventual re-release on the PlayStation 2 managing to secure a further 1.4 million in sales would prove the willingness of consumers to follow the series in spite of whatever odd subtitles it may have bore (as well as whichever platforms Capcom might support). It probably helps that in its time, Code: Veronica was seen as an improvement on established series conventions: Bringing the gameplay into true 3D, expanding on narrative elements, populating the world with larger hordes of the undead, and generally delivering everything fans had hoped to see in a next-generation Resident Evil title. The impression that I get is that opinion on the entry has soured somewhat in more recent years; with particular characterizations becoming widely mocked, more linear environmental design being seen as a step backward in exploration, and the general assessment that the series should’ve already evolved past “tank controls” by this point in time. I don’t know: I certainly never minded the fact it was a relatively minor iteration all told, given that it was rooted in a gameplay formula I still held a lot of love for. Plus, there’s the fact that Claire Redfield is easily my favorite series protagonist, and that Code: Veronica goes a long way in cementing her as a bona fide badass.

All that said, I can at least understand the perspective of folk who wanted to see Code: Veronica move even further away from the traditional series design. And hey, if a change in pace is what they were looking for, there was always 2001’s release of Resident Evil Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica! Perhaps you’ve never heard of this sequel to Gun Survivor, and its re-imagining of Code: Veronica as a first-person shooter? I reckon that’d be on account of the fact it never released in any capacity in North America; as it initially debuted as an exclusively Japanese arcade cabinet (complete with a mounted gun peripheral), and only later came to the PlayStation 2 in Japan and Europe. It’s a curious beast, which on the one hand serves as an abbreviated version of Code: Veronica‘s events, and on the other serves as a mash-up of various different elements of Resident Evil history; between a constantly pursuing Nemesis Tyrant ripped straight from the 3rd installment (among other returning enemies from the original trilogy), gameplay conceits which feel like an homage to the previous games’ ‘Battle’ and ‘Mercenaries’ modes, and the fact that it’s the direct successor to Gun Survivor of all things. A unique convergence of source materials here, to say the least. But how coherently do they all come together? Well, in my humble opinion, it actually all comes together quite nicely! But of course I’d say that, wouldn’t I? I’m a sucker for these goofy, first-person arcade takes on Resident Evil, and my biases are naturally gonna be on full display here. At the very least, I can try to objectively summarize the contents of the game, and measure how it evolved on the first Gun Survivor’s groundwork.

The game gives you a choice of playable character between Claire Redfield [and her Beretta 93R] or Steve Burnside [and his akimbo Gold Lugers], where your non-chosen character becomes an AI partner during gameplay (if not selected by a second player). With its primary ‘Arcade’ game mode taking place across five stages – spanning the Rockford Prison Island, Spencer Estate, and underground airport – Survivor 2 stops just short of adapting any locations from the second half of Code: Veronica (where Claire and Steve arrive in Antarctica). As such, you’ll primarily be fighting enemies and bosses from that first half of the game, while exploring self-contained stages and hunting for keys to unlock emergency gates — your effective barriers between levels. And in the process of doing all this, you’ll be granted the freedom to move freely while shooting, as you can now travel in any direction you please (strafing is an option) at a decently quick speed. The trade-off is that your ability to precisely aim is traded for an automatic lock-on system based on your horizontal orientation (looking up and down doesn’t feature), which often fails to prioritize the most imminent threats to your character out of a group of enemies. Further streamlining of controls removes the need for the inventory screen, as healing items work instantaneously and as you can only swap between your given handgun(s) and one other pick-up weapon; between an assault rifle (AK-47), shotgun (SPAS-12), magnum (Colt Python), dual submachine guns (MAC-11s), grenade launcher (M79), and rocket launcher. Certainly a more varied arsenal, but also one that sees you with precious limited ammo for each secondary offering / constantly swapping out for whatever you’re lucky enough to find in a level.

Of course, the most arcadey component on display here is the ever-present ticking clock in each stage, which cannot be extended or paused. When it reaches 0’00″00, you’ll be set upon by the Nemesis, who is capable of striking you or your partner down in a single blow. This is your impetus to complete stages in a timely fashion, and what keeps you from hogging the theoretical arcade cabinet all to yourself. I reckon Nemesis’ presence is also the key tip-off that this whole game is decidedly non-canon — a fact which has inspired a fan theory (often erroneously cited as fact) that the events of the game are dreamed up by Claire after Chris rescues her from Antarctica. Never mind the fact that the game’s ending is clearly meant to show Claire and Steve as the ones escaping together via jet, as the cutscene prior to the credits roll details. In either case, a full playthrough of the arcade mode (or its cabinet version) is likely to run you a brief half-hour, which is fair enough given its coin-op roots. It’s a good thing then that the console release attempts to bolster its available content with the addition of a few extra unlocks and bonus game modes (featuring additional extra weapons); including the particularly inspired ‘VS. Roach Mode,’ wherein you’re made to mop up entire stages crawling wall-to-wall with cockroaches. All in all, I just can’t help but find myself charmed by Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica, for as fleeting and perhaps over-simplistic as it may be. Getting a chance to play its arcade cabinet is on my bucket list, right underneath potentially experiencing the original arcade Wild Gunman. A girl can dream…

There is one more note I should probably make on the subject of Survivor 2: Tose weren’t involved at all in its production, with credit instead going to Capcom’s collaborators on the game at Namco — as well as support studios in NexTech (providing cutscene animation) and SIMS (presumably assisting in the console conversion). This is a somewhat curious matter, as Tose had actually been involved in the original Code: Veronica‘s development on consoles — to where you’d think their expertise would’ve come in handy here? Rather than get conspiratorial in assuming that Tose didn’t get the gig on account of disappointing Capcom with their work on the first Gun Survivor: I’ll instead posit the theory that they were probably too busy as it was continuing to work alongside Capcom on Resident Evil 0 (plus at least one other upcoming title), which at this point would’ve been shifted its development to Nintendo’s GameCube. That, and the fact that Namco could lay claim to better understanding the Sega Naomi hardware the game’s arcade release would be made to leverage, making them a more natural choice [than Tose] as the lead developers on the project. Bearing all that in mind, it’s hard to imagine that Capcom were particularly peeved with Tose about how their first at-bat turned out, especially when considering the fact that Capcom and Tose were already continuing their working relationship at this point. As a matter of fact, Capcom would only go and bring back their favorite ghost developer to work on the very next entry in the ‘Gun Survivor’ series — a series which would persist for another two games before ultimately being put to rest. Naturally, I reckon we should at least briefly cover both of those remaining titles, as well as acknowledging the different studios responsible for each of them.

Gun Survivor 3: Dino Crisis – alternatively known as Dino Stalker outside of Japan – would see the series deviate from entries into the Resident Evil franchise, and instead visit the world of Capcom’s Dino Crisis (as its title likely already indicated). With Tose back again at the helm of development [alongside Capcom’s Production Studio 3], you may be surprised to hear that their return to Gun Survivor sees itself borrowing far more from Survivor 2 than their own debut installment: Movement and shooting can be performed simultaneously, pick-up weapons are swapped out on the fly, and a constantly ticking timer adds urgency to every stage. It makes for an altogether action-packed romp, which furthers the hybridization of rail shooter mechanics in a traditionally-controlling first-person shooter… well, sort of “traditionally-controlling,” anyway: There’s still some clunky input on display here, as concessions made for the optional GunCon control scheme end up invariably affecting the standard controller scheme as well. At the very least, you get dedicated strafing on L2 and R2, where R1 works as an immediate trigger — the days of stopping and shooting long-since past us. All told, this might well be the most fast-moving and frenetic game in the Gun Survivor series, aided by the nature of the darting dinosaurs you’ll have to keep pace with. It’d have made a fine fit in arcades, but that evidently wasn’t in the cards this time around: It’d release as a PlayStation 2 exclusive on June 27th, 2002 in Japan, and in September across Europe and North America.

For those curious about the plot and how Gun Survivor 3 ties into the larger Dino Crisis franchise: It’s a time travelling side-story, in which a WWII fighter pilot named Mike Wired (hell yeah) is suddenly thrust forward three million years in time to where dinosaurs have been made to populate the Earth once more — a result of the ‘Noah’s Ark Plan’ central to the plot of Dino Crisis 2. Given a high-tech gun and wristband device on his arrival in the future, Mike has to quickly come to grips with his dangerous new environment, and is lucky to find himself guided by Paula Morton — a returning character central to Dino Crisis 2′s plot. Ultimately, the revelation is made that the game takes place within a “hyperspace nexus” (don’t think too hard about any of this) where different points and objects in history are all converging due to an issue with one of the computers used in manipulating time, and that Mike was chosen as the man for the job of sorting this mess out due to the fact that he was already destined to die at the moment he was taken from in 1943 — where pulling him from said time won’t risk altering the past and disrupting history. Ultimately, Mike does his duty in hyperspace, woos Paula in the process, and gets returned to his final moments in 1943, only to find himself saved from certain death — the result of Paula’s loving intervention. A tidy little self-contained side story in the Dino Crisis canon, which effectively leverages familiar characters (and dinosaurs) while carving out a unique theme and setting for itself — likely to please most fans of the franchise, who are willing to tolerate the shift in genre.

Naturally, most folk did not tolerate the shift in genre, and Dino Stalker was summarily subjected to critical backlash much in the same vein as the original Gun Survivor. (It should be noted that almost nobody bothered to cover Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica in any critical capacity.) Many evidently perceived it as a stop-gap game — a rush-job released to distract from the fact that the upcoming Dino Crisis 3 had been subject to several delays by that point. In Douglass C. Perry’s review of Dino Stalker for IGN, he posits the following: “Dino Crisis 3 is supposedly appearing on Xbox, though that’s been the case for about 19 years now, (just kidding) it was announced about two years ago, and nobody has ever seen a single iota on it. So what happens? Capcom flips the R&D microwave on, and presto, a brand new game flops out, using the Dino Crisis universe, but it’s not a sequel, it’s not a prequel, it’s what called a forgettable, a drop in the bucket, or it’s formally known as Dino Stalker, a hodge-podge of first-person shooter aspects, smashed into the middle of a slow-ass adventure, using the light gun, and with a story that is about as fresh as a McDonalds Cheeseburger on a slow Sunday.”^[17] (Christ, get a load of that last run-on sentence.) Where the game being made as a stop-gap is honestly pretty likely, I’m still of the opinion that it has its merits — perhaps more so than the eventual release of Dino Crisis 3, even. Your mileage here may vary, of course.

November 2002 would finally see Resident Evil 0 brought to fruition, bringing Tose’s time with the franchise to a temporary close. They’d be called upon again to help develop 2011’s Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D on Nintendo’s 3DS, before further contributing to the Revelations series. Now, you may have noticed that we didn’t mention the fourth and final Gun Survivor game anywhere among those future contributions. That’s on account of development duties being passed onto yet another new studio — and in this case, I really do mean “new”: The young guns at Cavia – fresh off of their debut in 2003’s Drakengard – would be called upon to develop Gun Survivor 4: Biohazard – Heroes Never Die — better known to those outside of Japan simply as Resident Evil: Dead Aim. Released February 2003 in Japan [and in June that same year in North America], Dead Aim brings the zombie-shooting action onboard a cruise ship as its [initial] setting; sharing a curious similarity with previous spin-off title Resident Evil Gaiden on Game Boy Color, and predating the likes of Ubisoft’s similarly-themed Cold Fear by roughly two years. The comparisons to Gaiden in particular don’t end with the naval setting, either: Dead Aim takes Gun Survivor in the curious direction of hybrid camera perspectives – switching between third-person exploration and first-person shooting – as well as swapping out between different protagonists at key moments in the story. But where Gaiden‘s first-person action played out as timing-based encounters, Dead Aim obviously iterates on the mash-up of rail shooter conceits (aided by support for the GunCon, as well as a combination of USB mouse and controller) with a freedom of movement available while aiming. And where Gaiden leverages familiar returning characters in Leon S. Kennedy (Hey, that’s Ark’s friend!) and Barry Burton, Dead Aim‘s cast is unique to this entry in the series — marking their first and final appearances in the world of survival horror.

So as not to leave any of y’all wondering about Dead Aim’s plot: You primarily play as an American special agent Bruce McGivern, who is in pursuit of an ex-Umbrella executive turned terrorist named Morpheus. Discovering that Morpheus has hijacked an Umbrella-owned ocean liner known as the ‘Spencer Rain,’ it’s revealed that he has access to ICBMs lined with the T-Virus, and has threatened to hold the United States and China at ransom with them. To this end, McGivern’s mission is to prevent these missiles from being launched, and take down Morpheus in the process. Also given this mission is a female Chinese agent Fong Ling (also serving as your secondary playable character), who alternately saves Bruce’s life and sabotages his progress. At one point (in the game’s introductory FMV cutscene), Fong Ling saves Bruce from being held at gunpoint by Morpheus by tossing a grenade between the two, which mortally wounds the villain and causes him to inject an experimental “T+G-Virus” transforming him into a surprisingly sexy B.O.W., and thereby establishing them as a sort of Nemesis-type pursuer that your pair of characters will have to occasionally contend with. At roughly the mid-way point of the game, the Spencer Rain crashes into an island-bound Umbrella facility, where Morpheus’ missiles are housed and ready to fire. When the Chinese government acquiesces to Morpheus’ demands, they attempt to terminate their own agent in the field via satellite-fired lasers, which McGivern saves Fong Ling from being struck down by. From there, the two work in tandem to take down Morpheus and prevent the missile launch, and ultimately wind up striking a genuinely cute little relationship with each other. Obviously, none of the events of this game seem to impact the larger series continuity; though there is an odd file you can find which seems to insinuate that Morpheus is somehow secretly responsible for the events of the original Resident Evil and 0?** Something tells me that last bit in particular is almost certainly non-canon.

Of all the Gun Survivor games, Dead Aim does perhaps the best job of actually retaining the feel of its survival horror source material. In that sense, its design aligns more with the original Resident Evil Survivor than either of its arcadier sequels, as it sees the bulk of your time in-game spent methodically exploring its atmospheric environments. When it comes time for the shooting though, you’ll have to contend with veritable hordes of the undead all at once, to where you’re highly encouraged to put the game’s heavier ordinance to more frequent use. Once you realize the sheer necessity in certain instances of your shotgun, magnum, assault rifle, grenade launcher, and particle rifle; you’ll get the impression that avoiding fights and opting for dodging isn’t so much a viable option in Dead Aim — nevermind.an attempt at a classic “knife only” playthrough. And while ammo is mercifully made available to you at something of a surplus, your inventory space proves a more precious commodity, and so you enter into a balancing act of how much of each munition type you’re willing to carry / which bullets you’ll be leaving behind. It makes for an interesting take on the “ammo economy” concept, and one that can’t be circumvented by simply stockpiling your rounds inside item boxes (as they don’t exist in the game — onboard the Spencer Rain or beyond). All that being said, the final act does eventually toss a veritable railgun your way with infinite ammo, so that the game can ultimately embrace action shlock in favor of survival horror. But hey, at least Cavia managed to maintain some manner of restraint for the better portion of its proceedings.

Where Dead Aim’s reception seemed to rate higher on average than previous entries in the Gun Survivor series, it’s with its sales where it seemed to fall short: An estimated 350K units sold according to VGChartz would put it above the likes of Dino Stalker (estimated 220K), but I can imagine that figure not quite meeting sales expectations; considering that Dead Aim was clearly given a more substantive budget than previous Gun Survivor entries, and represents possibly the most cohesive design of the whole lot. Perhaps for this reason, Dead Aim would represent the final entry in this sub-series, and put the final bullet in Gun Survivor. Either that, or Capcom simply realized that they didn’t really need a running sub-series in order to take Resident Evil down more action-oriented excursions: The release of Resident Evil 4 in 2005 basically went and changed everything with regards to the franchise’s futures, and established that over-the-shoulder shooting action would primarily be the new direction over the course of the next twelve years. Simply put, there was more money to be made in numbered installments and more simply-subtitled entries to the series, rather than the clunkier nature (and perhaps unfavorable reputation) of Gun Survivor’s branding. I want to believe that the lessons learned from Resident Evil Survivor and its sequels might have helped inform Resident Evil 4’s design in some way — that Capcom had spent the three years cultivating the sub-series taking diligent notes as to what worked and what didn’t. But ultimately, Resident Evil 4 was a truly unique game in its time, and one which didn’t actually seem to draw much from the likes of these experiments in hybrid first-person shooting. If there are any lessons Capcom are more likely to have taken, they’re probably more along the lines of not having to hold too close to tradition, and to feel empowered in taking the franchise in new genre directions.

Of course, I’d be remiss not to mention one more Resident Evil spin-off series here, which is far more likely to have taken direct cues from the likes of Gun Survivor. I’m of course talking about my beloved Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (and by association, its second installment in Darkside Chronicles), and its commitment to delivering full-fledged on-rails shooter experiences set within the franchise. Originally designed to leverage the Nintendo Wii’s Wiimote controller as an impromptu light gun, these entries would be made imminently more accessible than their Gun Survivor predecessors by virtue of not demanding additional peripherals in order to enjoy the intended experience — only asking for the console’s standard controller, and the potential for full cooperative play if you should happen to have a second one of them on-hand. Of course, this unique selling point got lost with the conversions of the titles to the PlayStation 3, and the additional need for a model of ‘PlayStation Move’ controller in order to approximate the same experience. But that’s neither here nor there: What’s more important to note is just how novel a take on the rail shooter genre these games represent, and the unique space they occupy within the larger franchise. For those who don’t know, the Chronicles games comprise condensed retellings of events from previous Resident Evil games (as well as original scenarios and different character perspectives on major series events), where the familiar proceedings are reimagined as more linear action affairs stripped of puzzle-solving and other diversions from the shooting action. In example: The original Resident Evil plays out with Chris and Jill sticking together to escape the hellish mansion, and encountering far more creatures along the way to overcome and shoot down. While skipping over / streamlining large chunks of the source material, it still works to recreate most of the key moments and highlight set pieces, and provide the essential ‘Cliff Notes’ of those previous games.

What makes the Chronicles games truly unique as rail shooters though is their immersive perspective and methodical pacing. Where a standard arcade rail shooter may see you zipping from point to point in order to engage with their shooting, the Chronicles games see you moving more carefully and deliberately through its recreations of claustrophobic corridors and densely-detailed rooms, as the characters will often continue to move while shooting in order to establish distance between themselves and approaching enemies. As the player, you’ll often find yourself spun around to deal with unexpected threats popping up behind you or emerging from unseen corners of the environment, and feeling as though the character / camera movements would line up naturally with your own in these encounters. To this end, you’re given quick access to the knife in order to deal with sudden close encounters, and occasionally made to participate in QTEs in moments where you’d be taken by surprise by unexpected attacks. As a trade-off for the lack of traditional exploration in order to seek out items, destroying objects in the environment will reveal hidden items and files — providing you with ammunition, healing items, and collectibles to encourage your continued vandalism. Of course, you can also inadvertently make things more difficult for yourself by shooting precious light sources, which will bask your surroundings in darkness and make aiming at your targets measurably more challenging. Tight aim in order to target critically-damaging spots on enemies and conservative use of your more powerful weapons (which can be upgraded between missions using points earned in your playthroughs) become essential in surviving the scenarios, and impart the survival horror tension you may not expect from a game of this genre. Of course, this is all building on concepts which Resident Evil Survivor first toyed with, and benefits from directly bridging survival horror and rail shooting mechanics — bypassing the clumsy first-person movement entirely, and more confidently delivering on a narrower hybrid genre concept.

You’d hope that the developers at Tose could look at what Capcom’s Production Studio 4 were able to accomplish here, and feel some measure of pride in knowing they first walked so that their valued customers could run. But perhaps they were too busy at the time to even take notice — back to work on too many other titles to even keep up with other studios’ goings-ons. Where I’d usually take this opportunity in an article to cover the dying days of a developer as a final chapter on their history, Tose are still in operation to this very day, and have had hands on more games in the interim than I can even begin to highlight here! I could cover their continued collaborations with Nintendo to support titles such as Super Princess Peach and the latest WarioWare (which is – at the time of this writing – 2021’s Get It Together! on Nintendo Switch), or their work with Square Enix on continued Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy entries. Maybe you’d be interested to hear how they’ve had a hand in several titles in The Sims franchise, or how they helped develop the Metal Gear series’ most underrated entry in Ghost Babel for the Game Boy Color? Perhaps one day, we’ll get around to covering their return to working with Capcom in order to develop Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop — their pseudo-conversion of the Xbox 360’s Dead Rising to the Wii, as developed on top of Resident Evil 4’s engine and gameplay foundation. But ultimately, these surprise highlights and more notable works don’t really paint the full picture of Tose’s continued industry contributions — the full breadth of their uncredited work across thousands of games, pointing to their being one of the most prolific studios in the entire business. And yet, they still continue to do the bulk of their work in secret, and dutifully perform their role as “ninja” developers — leaving little to no evidence of their handiwork.

That’s the thing about Tose: They’re not a developer whose work you can attempt to accurately chart or measure across any length of time, to where you’d be able to point out consistent high or low points in the quality of their output. At the same time, honing in on the financial successes and failures of games they contributed to is a pointless endeavor, as sales figures are somehow a non-factor in their business model (for the most part, at least). Truth be told, I think my standard article format is kind of ill-equipped to cover a developer of their nature? See, I’m used to framing my examinations of developers around negatively-received games, and examining how said games impacted their futures as a company. But in the case of Tose, they’re effectively bulletproof when it comes to the odd flop or financial failure: They could theoretically be called on to develop the worst video game of all time, watch as it sells zero copies, and shrug it off as the company who initially contracted them is promptly swallowed by the earth. Now that’s what I call “job security,” I tell you what. Of course, that isn’t to imply that Tose have spent the past decades just phoning in their work: They wouldn’t keep getting hired if they weren’t efficient at what they do, or if their results didn’t continue to please their customers. It’s just a unique position that they’re afforded here, and one which complicates the process of writing a narrative around them. When “success or failure” ultimately plays little role in a story’s conclusion, it rarely makes for interesting reading.

As of its last investigation by journalists for a major news story, the current state of Tose’s game development studios would appear to be fairly stable. In 2015, their primary work forces consisted of a 600-person team in Japan and a roughly 400-person team operating between China and the Philippines, which collectively produce / support anywhere between thirty and fifty games every year.^[18] Despite their overseas marketing team leader Koji Morosawa bemoaning the difficulty of “putting ourselves out there” due to their inability to share details with clients regarding what games they’ve contributed to, this honestly strikes me as a non-issue: Their reputation in the industry precedes them, and their long-running relationships with some of the most profitable developers and publishers in the industry likely means they’re never hurting for work. At the same time though – and despite earlier insinuations I may have made – they are not a company without their share of tough calls and business missteps: In June 2013, they shuttered their United States subsidiary company, before further closing their Shanghai studio just two months later.^[19] These closures came as part of a consolidation effort prior to establishing their Phillipines division, indicating a renewed focus toward the elusive and unpredictable Southeast Asian market — an avenue of business which has thrown no small number of foreign players for a loop. Looking to the current-day, one of the latest updates on their website (dated April 26th, 2022) indicates that Tose are currently chasing after the “metaverse business” trend, with a posted link to a PDF press statement declaring their intent and their partners in this venture. Where my  instinct tells me that investments in this particularly pervasive grift are unlikely to prove profitable for most who would involve themselves with it, it’s unlikely that the potential failure of this scheme would have a significant impact on Tose.

The fact is, Tose can afford to take these gambles with relative frequency, as their core business continues to prove consistent and reliable — evidenced in financial reports documenting regular increases in quarter-to-quarter profitability. Tose has been a part of the video game business since nearly its inception, and I expect they’ll continue to play some role in it to the industry’s bitter end. For as long as there are companies in need of discrete support studios – anonymous helping hands to help get troubled projects past the finish line – Tose will be there to answer the call. And as dedicated historians continue to unearth evidence of Tose’s secretive contributions – to pull back the veil on their decades-long development history – perhaps in time we can begin to piece together a better understanding of their inner workings. Maybe more ex-employees will emerge in time to shine a light on their time with the elusive company, and provide further insights into how the proverbial video game sausage gets made? Only time will tell, of course. And in our own continued mission to document the history of “bad games,” we’ll inevitably continue to cover more in the way of their career lowlights — whether we realize them as their handiwork or not.

As we wrap up this article on the subject of Resident Evil Survivor, I feel compelled to provide a final thought on the game: The Resident Evil franchise has become something of a shape-shifting entity in itself, which has been able to adapt and alter in order to accommodate audience expectations. Where its seemingly constant turns in genre may be met with initial resistance from fans, history shows that Capcom has a habit of hitting more often than they miss. And while some of those misses may make for especially embarrassing strike-outs, the home runs still hit like nothing else. For every Umbrella Corps, you get a Resident Evil 7. For every Operation Raccoon City, there’s a Revelations waiting in the wings. So, even if a given Resident Evil title might not be your cup of tea, there’s always a more standardized entry in the series due to make up for that unpreferred diversion. And if not for these experimental titles, who’s to say that Capcom wouldn’t have simply rested on their laurels, and doomed Resident Evil to a pattern of complacency and stagnant fixed-camera games that likely would’ve condemned the franchise to an early demise? This rejection of “playing it safe” and willingness to deviate from established series norms can be traced back to Resident Evil Survivor, which emboldened Capcom to continue taking these calculated risks in the decades to follow. And for that, we Resident Evil fans all owe it a debt of gratitude, and a state of open mind should you choose to try the game out for yourself. Plus, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Umbrella Chronicles without it. So, y’know: Thanks are most certainly in order for that, at the very least.

** The file in question is titled ‘Dismissal Notice,’ and can be found while onboard the Spencer Rain. Marked as being written on August 20th, 1998, it details Morpheus’ firing from Umbrella as he is deemed “responsible for the incident in Raccoon City” (specifically referencing the events in the Arklay Mountains / Spencer Mansion). Seeing as the file doesn’t elaborate any further on this ridiculous revelation, and as Morpheus’ name has certainly never been mentioned in any prior Resident Evil games (or any later games, for that matter); I think the take-away we’re meant to have here is that Umbrella had wanted to get rid of Morpheus for quite some time prior to this point, and simply used the Raccoon City incident as a totally irrelevant / unwarranted excuse to do so? Either that, or Cavia were desperate to give  additional weight to Morpheus as lead antagonist, and were willing to play fast and loose with canon in order to further invest players in taking them down.

[1] Roper, Chris. “Capcom Releases Lifetime Sales Numbers.” IGN. May 23, 2008. Web.
[2] Cifaldi, Frank. “The Connection is Made […] Game Connection 2006 (Part Two).” Game Developer. April 20, 2006. Web.
[3] b c ‘CRV.’ “Interview: Daniel Auld.” GDRI. June, 2008. Web.
[4] “Annual Report 1999: Capcom’s Franchise Assets.” Capcom. Circa 1999. Web.
[5] b Elston, Brett. “GR Asks: Why was Biohazard renamed […]?” GamesRadar+. April 8, 2009. Web.
[6] “Capcom Sez: Play With Guns Kids.” GameInformer. November 29, 1999. Web. (Archive)
[7] Leeper, Justin.† “Preview: Resident Evil Gun Survivor – PlayStation.” GameInformer. February 7, 2000. Web. (Archive)
[8] Zdyrko, Dave. “Resident Evil Survivor.” IGN. May 11, 2000. Web.
[9] Hara, Ramon. “Albert Wesker’s VA Offers Reasons […] Acting May Not Sound Natural.” Game Rant. October 30, 2021. Web.
[10] Carsten, Paul. “China suspends ban on video game consoles […]” Reuters. January 6, 2014. Web.
[11] “Microsoft in China: Clash of Titans.” CNN (via IDG). February 23, 2000. Web. (Archive)
[12] Weigand, Mike. “Review: Resident Evil Survivor.” GamePro. December 11, 2000. Web. (Archive)
[13] Perry, Doug. “Review: Resident Evil Survivor.” IGN. September 13, 2000. Web.
[14] Stahl, Ben. “Resident Evil: Survivor Review.” GameSpot. February 4, 2000. Web.
[15] b Vargas, JM. “Resident Evil Survivor.” PSXNation. July 20, 2000. Web. (Archive)
[16] “Platinum Titles — Page 5.” Capcom. [Continuously updated webpage]. Web.
[17] Perry, Douglass C. “Review: Dino Stalker.” IGN. September 16, 2002. Web.
[18] Leone, Matt. “The Secret Developers of the Video Game Industry.” Polygon. September 30, 2015. Web.
[19] “History | Company Information.” Tose.co.jp. Last updated November 2020. Web.

† Though the GameInformer website appeared to lack author accreditation in this era, contributor Justin Leeper has verified his having written this preview for the site. This is also my excuse to name drop Justin Leeper as a Twitter mutual of mine, and plug him as being one of the most interesting people I know. And since I know he’ll eventually read this article [and this footnote]: I hope you didn’t mind me lifting your “Cannibalistic Undead Militia” joke for this article! I couldn’t resist.