Capcom's 1996 horror game was called Biohazard in Japan, but a forgotten DOS game and a New York hardcore punk band already held that name in the West, so an internal contest produced Resident Evil. This episode follows that accidental brand from Tokuro Fujiwara and Shinji Mikami's modest goal of updating the 1989 haunted-house game Sweet Home into a franchise with more than 213 million games sold, a $1.2 billion film series, stage musicals in Japan, and a claim to reviving the modern zombie.

Along the way we look at why the original PlayStation's limits forced pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed cameras, how tank controls turned vulnerability into fear, and how the series kept mutating: the over-the-shoulder action of Resident Evil 4, the first-person dread of Resident Evil 7 and Village, the remake era, and the 2026 mainline entry Requiem. ...