While Resident Evil purists can now enjoy the original Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, and Resident Evil 3 on PC thanks to GOG, it didn’t seem like Capcom was too enthusiastic about rereleasing the games on the platform in their original form at first. In an interview with The Game Business, GOG senior business development manager Marcin Paczynski says that the Japanese game studio insisted that players make do with the remakes instead.
“Capcom were like, ‘we have all of those remakes. It’s already the superior experience to those games.’ They didn’t really see the value in bringing back the vanilla versions. It took a lot of convincing that there is an audience that has a lot of memories about those games, and would love to experience exactly the same game again. Thankfully, we were able to convince them.”
While the versions of Resident Evil 1-3 on GOG aren’t exact 1:1 duplicates of those released on the PlayStation all those years ago (they include several PC-exclusive features such as support for multiple controllers and framerate fixes), they still run on the original source code. As a part of the GOG Preservation Program, these titles preserve the experience of playing the original games for years to come, rather than updating them via remasters or remakes.
As GOG’s PR representative recently remarked in an interview for AUTOMATON: “bringing classic Capcom titles like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis to GOG took time, persistence, and trust-building.” However, it was thanks to the team’s perseverance that the three Resident Evil games found their way to the platform. All three games currently have a user score of 4.7/5 or higher on GOG, making them some of the most positively reviewed titles on the platform. Thanks to their success, Capcom also gave the go-ahead to rerelease the original Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 on GOG.
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