Resident Evil 4 at 20: 2005’s Best Game still Doesn’t Need a Remake

Resident Evil 4 is 20 years old as of January 11—it was released in North America first, then a couple of weeks later in Japan, then March in PAL territories. If you were there for it, you already know that Capcom’s incredible action-focused shift of the Resident Evil formula came out on Nintendo’s GameCube first—an odd choice in some respects, given that the Big N was in their third year of getting trounced by sony and the Playstation 2, but that little purple cube packed a lot more punch than its undeserved reputation as a console for kids allowed people to notice. 

Resident Evil 4 would arrive on the Ps2 in time for the holiday season, which is where most people in that first run likely ended up experiencing it. They’re still updating sales numbers for the Ps2, you know, with the latest count at 160 million worldwide, whereas the GameCube (22 million) ranks ahead of just the Wii U as far as Nintendo consoles go, and barely ahead of Meta’s Quest 2 in terms of all consoles—that one isn’t exactly flying off of the shelves and causing the VR revolution in the process. It’s a good thing for Nintendo that they were also in the handheld business in this era.

Why the GameCube first, then? Capcom, like so many other former close partners of Nintendo’s, had barely supported the Nintendo 64 against the Playstation, with no exclusives and all of two ports (Resident Evil 2 and Mega Man Legends) released for the 64-bit machine in its lifetime. The GameCube, however, was disc-based instead of cartridge-based, which reopened some doors that had been closed by publishers that didn’t want to make games for a console that was costing them much more money to release games for, given the CD vs. cartridge pricing differences. The GameCube is where Capcom produced their heralded remake of Resident Evil, as well as the all-new prequel, Resident Evil Zero. Code Veronica ended up ported to the Cube, as did Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and entire collections for Mega Man and Mega Man X’s series, which had started on Nintendo hardware but kept going on sony’s after Capcom’s defection. To show just how back in the fold they were, Capcom revealed five new games, all for the GameCube, and all at an out-of-nowhere press conference in Japan in November, 2002. The idea being that Capcom was all-in on the GameCube, so you should be, too.

You’ve likely heard of most of these titles—nicknamed the Capcom Five—even if you weren’t aware of their backstory: Viewtiful Joe, Killer7, P.N.03, Dead Phoenix, and, the crown jewel of the bunch, Resident Evil 4. Every game had Resident Evil-creator shinji Mikami at the helm or close to it, and all but Killer7—which was developed by Goichi suda’s Grasshopper Manufacture with Capcom publishing—were produced internally by Capcom. While Dead Phoenix ended up canceled, the rest were all released, to varying degrees of success and fame. Viewtiful Joe ended up doing well enough to kick off a series. Killer7 became a cult favorite that helped launch suda’s career to the next level. P.N.03 is plenty enjoyable on its own, but various bits of its DNA have been showing up in Mikami’s work—at Capcom, at PlatinumGames, and at Tango Gameworks—for two decades now. And Resident Evil 4 is literally Resident Evil 4. The push for hardware sales didn’t quite work out as hoped for Capcom and Nintendo, and too many of those games are better appreciated in the present than they were at the time of their release, as well. But! Resident Evil 4. That’s an all-timer right there.

These were all marketed, pre-release, as GameCube exclusives. Which, save for P.N.03, didn’t end up happening. It turns out that Capcom UsA mistakenly claimed them all as GameCube exclusives, when, in fact, just Resident Evil 4 was supposed to be one; sure, the one that was truly going to push hardware sales was set to stay as an exclusive, but that didn’t end up happening, either. Two months before the release of Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube, Capcom announced that there would be a Ps2 port after all, just like with Viewtiful Joe and Killer7. Mikami did not take this well, and went as far as apologizing to GameCube fans for this, since he had promised it would remain a GameCube exclusive even with the console’s sales continuing to flag for years after the initial announcement. He’d threatened to quit his job at Capcom—translated as Mikami promising to “cut my head off”—if the game ever went multiplatform, and while he didn’t do that right away (the quitting part) it did end up happening eventually so that he could co-found the company that would become Platinum. 

Resident Evil 4 wasn’t the lone reason for his departure, but it was part of why the internal studio, Clover, responsible for the likes of Viewtiful Joe’s direct sequel and Okami, was formed in the first place: in order to give developers like Mikami more freedom and room to work on new ideas. When Clover was being reabsorbed into Capcom following God Hand’s commercial failure, Mikami—and others from Clover, like Hideki Kamiya—decided to leave instead.

Which is a long way of saying that Resident Evil 4 isn’t just one of the greatest games ever, hugely influential as both a third-person shooter and a survival horror game, but it also had an impact on the futures of key developers like Mikami. The way Capcom handled this game, expressly against Mikami’s very public wishes, directly led to him shifting over to Clover and away from Resident Evil, and their reabsorption of Clover spelled the end of his, and many others, time at Capcom. 

Resident Evil 4 remains incredible to this day. Capcom remade it in 2022, and that, too, is an incredible experience, but it’s also something of an unnecessary one. Not from a business perspective, no—Capcom recently announced that the Resident Evil 4 remake has sold nine million copies, the fastest any game in the series has ever hit that mark—but in terms of whether it needed to exist as a viable way of experiencing Resident Evil 4. 

Think of it this way. Resident Evil 4 Remake is great, it’s lots of fun, but it is, ultimately, unnecessary in the sense we already had Resident Evil 4. And that game is available, everywhere, always, and perfectly playable in the present: it’s been perfectly playable since 2005, on every platform imaginable. Besides the Playstation 2 port, Resident Evil 4 also ended up on the Wii, utilizing the IR pointer function of the Wii Remote, and on Windows, both released in 2007. It landed on iOs in 2009, and in HD on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2011. Android devices received a port in 2013, while the Playstation 4 and Xbox One received an updated edition of the game in HD in 2016. While Resident Evil 4 skipped the Wii U, the switch brought it back to Nintendo systems in 2019. It’s also on the aforementioned Quest 2 as of 2021. Did it need to be remade, when it’s this widely available, and supported enough each time out that Capcom keeps re-releasing it again and again? (On a related note, I had to turn on three different versions of the game to check and see which one had the most stuff unlocked for a New Game Plus run.) 

HD edition or not, the textures aren’t what we’re used to from AAA releases, sure, but is that a requirement at a time when much-heralded, brand-new games are throwbacks, graphically, visually, in their playstyle, to a polygonal time of far fewer visible pores? There are some stunning AAA games on Paste’s top 40 from 2024, but that list is also loaded with games that the industry would consider either “AA” or “retro” or both. We’re not living in an era where everything always looks like it costs as much as sony’s latest flex of the Playstation 5’s muscle. We’re living in an era where past is present, and future, too, where games on the same year-end list can harken back to the polygons of the ‘90s or the pixels of the ‘80s or go so hard on the processing power that even today’s strongest platforms struggle to actually run it. Was a remake of an all-time classic that still plays like an all-time classic truly necessary in this environment?

None of this is meant to diminish your own enjoyment of the REmake of Resident Evil 4—personally, Resident Evil 2’s remake is as good as Resident Evil gets, thanks to its understanding of what made the game so good in the first place, and my first run of Resident Evil 4 Remake will not be my last. But the necessity, if you can even call it that, of remaking Resident Evil 4 wasn’t there in the same way it was for Resident Evil 2, especially since the latter’s remake is built off of, to a degree, gameplay changes made by the former that were then looped back around for remakes of Resident Evil 3 and then 4. You can construct a believable argument that, for all the impressive graphical flourishes and updates and modernizations, the remake is not as good as its source material, because there wasn’t anything that truly needed updating or fixing—now, if anything, it’s a little too smooth, a little too sanded down, a little less weird in the ways that made Resident Evil 4 what it was and is. Which, if anything, is a testament to the strength and timelessness of Resident Evil 4 more so than a suggestion that something is truly wrong with its remake.

It’s just a bit of a shame to see the original game—as good now as it was on the day it was released—pushed aside in favor of a remake when, outside of the knowledge that it would sell like wild, there wasn’t a pressing need for it. Resident Evil 4 is everywhere: in every survival horror game that leans heavy on the action, in third-person shooters, in every post-RE4 Resident Evil that’s been released since. Maybe you’re out of practice with tank controls, or never had any practice with them at all, but you’ll be surprised at how swiftly and efficiently you can move with them once you get the hang of them. You’ll forget in a hurry that you were ever “limited” by them; you’ll be too busy taking out Los Ganados and weird human-sized flying insects with terrifying precision to remember. 

Kerry Brunskill recently wrote a piece titled “I don’t like retro gaming,” which is not in any way a polemic against older games. Instead, she discussed the artificial distinctions between games that have been out for a while and games that are new and the way some people treat those distinctions, which ties in neatly with this idea covered here that everything—even Resident Evil 4—needs to be remade instead of just kept available, always:

There’s a strange cultural barrier found in gaming that other forms of entertainment generally lack. Nobody ever said “You seriously want to watch Alien? But that’s from the ’70s”. Batman’s been in comics for over 80 years—nobody cares. I regularly hear music from 20 or more years ago on mainstream radio stations focussed on playing new tracks, it’s just part of the mix. I could re-read The Lord of the Rings (1954) right now, and it’d just be another fantasy book. The Nightmare Before Christmas, now decades old, is still merchandised to hell and back. The concept of being a retro movie watcher, music listener, or book reader doesn’t really exist. People will obviously always have their own preferences, but outside of conscious self-pigeonholing the lines between eras are fuzzy and carry little meaning.

…

These days the only boundaries between the old and the new are the ones we create ourselves. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a nigh-perfect modern delight, as well as the latest in a surprisingly long line of decent games starring the Nazi-punching archeologist—I’ve got an Amiga copy of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis sitting on a shelf, and anyone can hop on steam or GOG and grab a working version of their own right now if they feel like it. Yes, they’re different, but only in the same way all the various kinds of star Wars and superman are different. We can all have both, and we don’t have to pretend there’s some actual barrier between the two, that one of them is esoteric and inaccessible, only understood by those possessing some aging mindset or ancient skill either. They’re just two fun adventures that use different techniques to tell the same kind of story.</blockquote>

My own publication is called Retro XP, but it’s not because, as Brunskill rails against, retro games are inherently better than modern games, or to boost my own ego for spending time down that particular rabbit hole and Knowing Things about gaming’s history. They’re just games, and games I want to play and learn about and experience, or experience again! Good, bad, in between. Thrilling, boring, ambitious, safe. They’re just games with a different release date on them, same as games today, just older. The biggest barrier between most people and enjoyment of those games is knowing they exist at all, or having access to the ones they do know of—consider trying to solve the former part of the mission statement of the work that writers like myself and Brunskill produce. Resident Evil 4 did not and does not suffer from any such issues—part of why its remake has sold nine million copies is because everyone already knows what Resident Evil 4 is, or has at least been given the opportunity to know. If Resident Evil 4 needs a remake to raise awareness and to make it playable in the present, then we’ve got a whole lot more work to do telling everyone about gaming’s past.

Luckily, Capcom is one of the better publishers out there in terms of preserving their own history and keeping it available. The existence of Resident Evil 4’s remake has not erased the original from storefronts—it hasn’t been delisted or disposed of, you can still buy it, and often at a heavily reduced price, on the modern platforms it was available on prior to Remake’s release. That’s encouraging, in the sense that Capcom has, for the most part, kept the various versions of their Resident Evil games available, even as the remakes, kicked off all the way back in 2002 on the GameCube, started coming. What I hope you get out of all of this, then, is that, like Capcom, you shouldn’t forget about what Resident Evil 4 used to be, because it’s still Resident Evil 4 in the present, and will continue to be as long as we keep coming back to it.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.