How Resident Evil Stayed Relevant for 30 Years

Opinion piece by AaronZ

Thirty years.

Thirty years of locked doors, limited inventory space, some of the most memorable monsters in gaming history, and a handful of characters who genuinely shaped who I wanted to be. Let me tell you how it started for me, and why it has never really stopped.

I was born in 1994, which means the original Resident Evil came out when I was barely two years old. My story does not begin in 1996. It begins in 1998, with a young rookie cop named Leon S. Kennedy arriving in Raccoon City on the worst first day at work in the history of first days.

I cannot overstate what Leon meant to me as a child. He was young. He was inexperienced. He didn’t know what was happening any more than I did. He was not a superhero; he was a person who just kept going. I wanted to be Leon when I grew up.

I am thirty-two now and I will be honest: part of me still does.

That is the power Resident Evil 2 had on me, and it is the lens through which I have experienced every subsequent entry in this franchise. Not as a critic, but as someone for whom this series is genuinely personal. This is my attempt to explain to myself as much as anyone else, how a franchise born in the mid-nineties has managed to remain one of the most vital, most reinventive, most emotionally resonant in gaming for three full decades.

Lock the door behind you.

Raccoon City and the Rookie

RE2 is my ground zero.

I know Resident Evil 1 and the Spencer Mansion is brilliant. I have put in countless hours inside of that mansion and its grounds, I’ve been killed by Hunters more times than I care to admit, but I am owning this – Raccoon City is where I came in.

What hit differently about Leon’s scenario was that rookie dynamic. Twenty-one years old, no context, no backup, no reason to believe he was going to survive. And yet he kept going, accumulating allies, uncovering the conspiracy, and by the end of it all, choosing to carry the weight of what he had witnessed rather than walk away from it. RE2 is the story of how Leon Kennedy lost the life he thought he was going to have. It is also the story of how he became the person the franchise would need him to be.

But RE2 is not only Leon’s story, and I would be doing it a disservice to frame it that way. Claire Redfield arrives in Raccoon City looking for her brother, armed with little more than a motorbike and the kind of stubborn determination the Redfield family appears to run on. Where Leon is defined by obligation, Claire is defined by love, she is there because Chris is missing and no other reason matters. That distinction gives her scenario a different emotional texture entirely. She picks up Sherry Birkin, a child left behind by a catastrophe she had no part in making, and from that point the game becomes something else: a survival story about two people who have no business protecting each other, doing exactly that.

Claire never gets enough credit in conversations about this franchise’s best characters. She is warmer than Leon, more openly frightened, and in some ways more genuinely heroic for it, she is not trained for any of this. She just refuses to leave a child alone in a building full of the dead. That stubbornness, that refusal, is what carries her through Code: Veronica, through Revelations 2, through everything the series subsequently puts her through. She is looking for Chris in RE2, and in a sense she never really stops, that search for family, for connection, runs through everything she does.

The RPD deserves a paragraph all of its own. A converted art museum pressed into service as a police station, marble floors, ornate staircases, oil paintings of serene landscapes, now slicked with blood and crowded with the dead. The cognitive dissonance of that setting is one of the most effective pieces of environmental horror the series ever produced. Whoever decided that building should feel like a museum clearly understood something profound about the gap between what institutions promise and what they deliver.

Birkin haunts me for different reasons. Not the grotesque fights themselves, but what you understand underneath them, the man being devoured by his own obsession, still mutating, still present enough to register. And Sherry watching her father become unrecognisable, a child who loved him even when the obsession consumed him, gives the horror a human weight that the series has rarely matched since.

This is where I fell in love with Resident Evil’s approach to story. It was never just monsters eating people. It was always about the human decisions, the hubris, the greed, the obsession, that made the monsters possible.

The Lore – An Umbrella So Large It Covers Everything

Given that this piece is appearing on the ‘Resident Evil Podcast’ website a show that has built its reputation on going deep into the lore, it would be remiss of me not to address what that mythology means to the franchise’s longevity. Because it matters enormously, and I do not think it gets the structural credit it deserves.

At the centre of almost all of it, still, is the Umbrella Corporation. Thirty years on, with Requiem in 2026, Capcom still cannot quite leave it behind. Umbrella is not just a villain. It is the load-bearing architecture of the entire universe. Every outbreak, every protagonist’s shattered career, every moral catastrophe in this series traces a line back to decisions made inside that organisation. It is the connective tissue that holds thirty years of storytelling together.

What genuinely impresses me (if we ignore the remakes here for a moment) and what I think is underappreciated even among dedicated fans, is how coherent that mythology has remained across three decades, multiple writing teams, and wildly different creative directions. Resident Evil has no single author in the way that some franchises do. It has been written by committees, reshaped by commercial pressures, rebooted in tone at least four times. And yet the canon holds. New entries add to it rather than contradict it. Threads established in the late nineties are still being picked up and paid off today.

That coherence is not accidental. It is the result of a genuine, sustained commitment to the series’ internal logic and nowhere is that more evident than in the notes, files, and documents scattered throughout the games themselves. The environmental storytelling in RE2 and RE3 in particular is extraordinary: the fall of the RPD, the disintegration of Raccoon City’s institutions, the paper trail of Umbrella’s reach into local government and law enforcement, all of it is there, in memos and diary entries and incident reports, for anyone willing to look. Modern games with vastly larger budgets and writing rooms struggle to build this kind of cohesive, discoverable world. That it was achieved in the late nineties, across games developed under intense commercial pressure, is remarkable.

The lore can be intimidating; I say that as someone who has been living in it and still occasionally finds a thread I had not followed before. But that density is a feature, not a flaw. It is what rewards the kind of sustained, forensic attention that this podcast brings to it. The world is big enough to keep exploring because the people who built it, across all those years and all those teams, were careful enough to make sure it stayed consistent. That is rarer than it looks.

The Legacy of the Characters

Lore alone does not sustain a franchise for thirty years. You need characters whose survival matters, whose relationships evolve, whose psychology deepens across entries. Against all odds, Resident Evil has produced several of the most genuinely compelling figures in gaming history.

Leon S. Kennedy – The One I Grew Up With

I have already told you what Leon meant to me as a kid. But let me trace what the series does with him over time, because it is genuinely remarkable. The Leon of RE2 is eager and thrown into the worst possible situation. By RE4 he is a government agent with an almost physical ease in situations that would destroy most people. By RE6 he is exhausted, carrying the particular weight of having had to shoot the President and his close friend who he was assigned to protect mid-zombification. By Requiem he is a veteran, still moving, still fighting, but now visibly tired in a way the series earns because we have watched every mile of the journey that got him there.

What keeps Leon working across wildly different tonal registers is that he is fundamentally defined by obligation. He did not choose this life; it was chosen for him by Raccoon City. He cannot unknow what he knows. He cannot stop being what that night made him. He keeps going not out of heroism exactly, but out of a stubborn, almost resigned sense that he is the person who must overcome, when others can’t.

Most of us are not heroes. We just keep showing up.

Jill Valentine – The First and Greatest

Jill is the beating heart of the classic era.

RE3 is her story in a way that no other entry belongs quite so completely to its protagonist, and the thing that makes her arc so powerful is the texture of her fear. She is not immune to terror. She runs. She makes bad decisions under pressure. She is a highly trained professional who is genuinely, repeatedly terrified, and who keeps going anyway. The gap between fear and action is where courage lives, and RE3 understands that better than almost any game in the series.

Her later story, three years under Wesker’s mental control, weaponised against her own partner, is bleak in ways the series cannot fully address because it does not know how. What Jill gets back at the end of RE5 is her body. Whether she gets anything else is left, frustratingly, unanswered.

I think I can speak for most of the fan base when I say, we want more Jill Valentine and we want it now.

Claire Redfield – The Heart the Series Takes for Granted

Introduced in RE2 as someone looking for her brother, armed with almost nothing and unwilling to leave. She ends that game having protected a child through the collapse of a city, faced down the thing that child’s father became, and emerged the other side still standing. The series subsequently sends her to Rockfort Island, through the Antarctic, into a Russian prison facility and through all of it she remains the most instinctively human of the franchise’s protagonists. Not trained. Not destined. Just unwilling to leave people behind.

Her dynamic with Sherry in RE2 is the game’s emotional core in a way that sometimes gets lost in the conversation about Leon’s scenario. Sherry is grieving the loss of her mother & father in real time while Claire is trying to get them both out alive and Claire holds space for that grief even when it is inconvenient, even when it costs her. That quality, that refusal to treat people as obstacles or assets, is what separates her from almost everyone else in this franchise’s roster. She will come back for you. That matters.

Chris Redfield – The Cost of Keeping Going

Chris is the series’ most consistent study in accumulated cost, and I think he is underrated precisely because he does not have the charisma of Leon or the tragedy of Jill, he just keeps absorbing damage and getting back up, which is less cinematic but possibly more honest.

You see Sonny? I can be nice about Chris.

He starts as the more difficult RE1 campaign, better combat stats, less inventory space and from there the series uses him as a measure of what this life does to a person over time. By RE5 he has lost Jill, lost squad members, and is operating on muscle memory and barely contained grief. Yes, that is why the boulder punch lands. It is not a meme; it is a man who has exceeded every reasonable human limit and the game being honest about what that looks like. By RE6 he has suppressed the memory of losing his entire team and spent some of that time at the bottom of a bottle. He does not get clean endings. He gets the next mission.

What the series never quite explores but always implies is the relationship between Chris and Claire the older brother who pulled her into the orbit of this world simply by existing in it, who she risked her life to find, who cannot protect her from any of it because the threat is everywhere and endless. There is something quietly devastating in that sibling dynamic that the franchise has never directly addressed. Chris keeps going because stopping means accepting what the work has cost.

The Reinventions – A Series That Never Stops Evolving

Here is the thing casual observers miss about Resident Evil: this franchise has fundamentally reinvented its own genre membership and survived every single transition. Most series do not survive one reinvention. The fact that this one has done it repeatedly, while maintaining a coherent thematic identity underneath the mechanical changes, is the central miracle of its longevity.

Resident Evil 4 – The Game That Changed Everything (Even If It Was Never Quite My Thing)

RE4 is, without hyperbole, one of the most important games ever made. I want to be upfront about something: personally, it has never fully clicked for me the way the classic era did or the way RE7 would later. The tonal shift, the quippier Leon, the more overtly action-movie pacing, the move away from the kind of dread I grew up with is not entirely what I come to this series for. I recognise that is a me problem more than a game problem, and I want to give it its due regardless.

Because its due is considerable. It did not just change Resident Evil it changed action gaming. The over-the-shoulder camera, the contextual melee prompts, the merchant system, the inventory briefcase, the crowd dynamics of the opening village encounter, these were innovations the rest of the industry spent the following decade reverse-engineering, and that is not an exaggeration.

What RE4 managed that its imitators often did not was preserve genuine tension underneath the action. You are never overwhelmed, you are always just barely more capable than what you face, which is a specific and difficult balance to maintain. And the thematic shift matters in ways I can appreciate even when I find the execution less personally compelling: a Ganado is not a zombie. It is a person whose will has been stolen, which is a darker idea than it first appears, and the game knows it.

RE4’s release is a genuine hinge in the franchise’s history, even in my personal experience of it. I had grown up with the dread of the classic games. RE4 was the moment I realised this series could do something entirely different and call it the same thing. Whether that excited you or unsettled you probably says something about the kind of horror fan you are. I was, and remain, in the second camp but I understand entirely why so many people live in the first.

Resident Evil 7- Fear Reintroduced

After RE6’s sprawling, overcrowded attempt to be three different blockbusters at once, the series needed to breathe, needed a reset.

RE7 understood something it had drifted from: horror is most effective when it is personal and enclosed. One house. One area, One family. Jack Baker’s relentless ground-floor pursuits. The sustained wrongness of every decaying surface. The sense that the house itself is against you.

It was a masterclass in relearning what the series was for, and it introduced Ethan Winters, who would carry two full entries and grow into something genuinely unexpected. I will be honest: Village was not entirely my thing either. The gothic excess pushed the tone somewhere I did not personally follow. But the ambition was real, and the way the series threaded the Winters arc across both games was bolder storytelling than Resident Evil usually attempts.

The Remakes – Honouring the Past

The remakes deserve their own extended section, because they represent something unusual in gaming: a franchise revisiting its own history not out of nostalgia or commercial cynicism, but with a genuine desire to understand what made those originals work and rebuild it at the highest possible level of craft.

The RE2 Remake – The One That Hit Hardest

I need to be transparent about my bias here. I am thirty-two years old. Resident Evil 2, the original is where I started. The 2019 Remake is therefore not just a great game. it is a great game about the game that made me who I am as a player. There is no reviewing that without acknowledging the personal freight it carries.

With that said: the RE2 Remake is the single greatest achievement in this franchise’s history, controversial or what? But I will stand by that.

The RPD rebuilt in loving, terrifying detail. The over-the-shoulder perspective giving the familiar building entirely new spatial logic. Rooms you remember from 1998 transformed; connections between areas now physically embodied. And the storytelling, Birkin’s tragedy, Sherry’s grief, Ada’s calculated warmth landing just as hard in 2019 as it did in 1998.

And then there is Mr. X. In the 1998 original, the Tyrant had a scripted appearance schedule. In the Remake, he walks the station corridors freely, procedurally, and the sound of his footsteps reverberating through the floors above you becomes one of the most reliably terrifying experiences I have had in twenty odd years of playing games. You are sitting in the library, working out a puzzle, and you hear him coming. The way that sound alone changes the texture of your thinking makes you suddenly aware of every exit, every resource, every possible mistake is survival horror design operating at its absolute peak.

The RE3 and RE4 Remakes – Different Challenges, Different Triumphs

The RE3 Remake is the contentious one. I think it is better than its reputation suggests, Jill’s characterisation is the best she has ever received in any game, and the Raccoon City street-level setting delivers a sense of scale the original could only gesture at. But the cuts are real, and the game it is does not quite contain the full scope of what it is based on.

The RE4 Remake faced a categorically different challenge: its source material was not antiquated. You could not modernise RE4 the way you modernised RE2, because RE4 was already modern, it was the template everyone else had spent eighteen years using. So, the Remake went deeper on character instead. Leon has more visible emotional complexity. Ashley has genuine agency. Luis Serra, a peripheral figure in 2005, becomes genuinely important, a man trying to atone for his own complicity. Ada finally gets scenes that illuminate her actual motivations rather than using mystery as a substitute for characterisation. The Remake does not improve the mechanics of the original. It enriches the humanity around them.

The Story Is Always the Foundation

Here is the argument this whole post has been building toward: Resident Evil has not survived thirty years because of its mechanics, impressive as those mechanics have been at their peaks. It has survived because it tells a specific, morally coherent story and it tells versions of that story in every single entry, regardless of how radical the mechanical reinvention.

The story is this: power without accountability is a pathogen. Institutions built on secrecy and the exploitation of the powerless will eventually produce catastrophe. And when that catastrophe comes, it is ordinary people, people who did not choose to be in the room, people who simply arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time, who pay the cost.

Leon Kennedy did not choose Raccoon City. Grace Ashcroft did not choose Rhodes Hill. Sherry Birkin did not choose her father’s obsession. The series keeps returning to the moment of the unwilling witness, the person on whom history descends without invitation. This is also, of course, the shape of real institutional disaster of contaminated blood supplies, suppressed pharmaceutical data, and the ordinary people caught in the fallout of decisions made in boardrooms they were never invited into.

Resident Evil is not trying to be a political franchise, it is far too invested in its own survival/action horror genre for that, but its core metaphor has never stopped being accurate. The Umbrella Corporation is fiction. What it represents is not.

The characters who drive the series are compelling precisely because they are shaped by institutional failure. Chris and Jill were officers who trusted their captain and their organisation. That trust was engineered and exploited, and the entire subsequent mythology flows from that specific betrayal. Leon arrived on his first shift to find the systems he was meant to serve had already collapsed. The moral weight of these stories comes from the fact that the people bearing it did not earn it, it was handed to them by others’ choices, and they have been carrying it ever since.

That is why the series ages so well. Not because the horror stays current, zombies are not trending as a metaphor in 2026 in the way they were in 1998 but because the structure underneath the horror does. Every generation produces new Umbrella Corporations. Every generation produces new ordinary people who arrive at the wrong time and find themselves carrying things they did not choose.

Requiem – Coming Home to Raccoon City

And then there is Resident Evil Requiem, released February 2026, and I want to talk about it because it feels like a culmination, I was not quite prepared for.

The game is set approximately thirty years after the missile strike back at the location where the franchise’s nightmare truly began. Leon is there. He is joined by Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst and the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft, whose work exposing Umbrella’s crimes was part of what ultimately brought the company down. Grace is new, but her lineage is not. She is the second generation of Raccoon City’s shadow, someone who grew up inside the consequences of 1998 without having lived through them directly. That dynamic, between the veteran and the inheritor, is what gives Requiem its emotional architecture.

Grace’s sections lean into survival horror, constrained resources, evasion, the dread of having to think rather than fight. Leon’s sections are more action-oriented, reflecting his decades of experience. It is, in structural terms, the game the series has been building toward since RE2: a dual-protagonist design that honours both halves of what Resident Evil is without forcing either to compromise for the other.

Walking back through the Raccoon City Police Department as ruins, as Leon Kennedy thirty years older, is the kind of thing that hits differently when you have been carrying this franchise since childhood. The development team worked out the blast zone. Built the ruins from the existing Remake layouts of the city. The statues are still there in the wreckage.

The name is doing real work. A requiem is a mass for the dead, a formal act of remembrance and release. Capcom calling this game Requiem is a statement: this is the franchise acknowledging its own history, sitting with the weight of everything Raccoon City started, and, perhaps, offering something like closure to the characters and the fans who have been living in its shadow.

I have finished it now. I have sat with it for a while, and I want to say something that I was not sure would still be true after three decades of playing these games: it got me. Not in the careful, analytical way I usually engage with this series as an adult, but in the immediate, physical way it got me as a kid, sitting on the floor in front of a television. That feeling, the one I first found in the RPD all those years ago as a child, young, and if we are being honest, too young to play a game like this, barely understanding what I was seeing but understanding completely that it mattered. Requiem gave it back to me. I didn’t know it still could. I am genuinely glad it can.

Thirty Years, Still Standing

I started this by telling you about a rookie cop in a converted art museum in 1998, and about a kid who wanted to be him when he grew up. I am that kid, now grown, and Leon is still going. That fact alone tells you something about why this franchise endures.

What keeps me here, what has kept millions of us here for thirty years is not nostalgia alone, though I am not above nostalgia. It is the sense that this franchise is genuinely trying to say something. That every locked door is a metaphor as well as a puzzle. That every monster was once a person, and the horror of what they became is inseparable from the human decisions that manufactured their fate. That survival, in this universe, is never just physical, it is the harder work of remaining human in the wreckage of what other people’s ambition left behind.

The series is thirty years old. It has killed and resurrected itself repeatedly. It has produced games of towering brilliance and games of debatable quality. It has given us characters we will still be talking about thirty years from now. And in 2026, it walked us back through the ruins of where it all began, with an older Leon and a new heir to the legacy, and somehow made it feel like both an ending and a beginning.

Somewhere right now, someone is starting Resident Evil 2 for the first time. They are in the RPD. They are running low on ammunition. They are hearing footsteps growing louder from somewhere above them.

They are not safe here.

Welcome to the family.

AaronZ – A fan since 1998. Still not safe. Wouldn’t have it any other way

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