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Resident Evil Online is a survival horror game set inside Raccoon City's last four days. Forty to a hundred strangers wake alone in the city on the morning of 28 September 1998, while Jill Valentine runs from the Nemesis and Leon Kennedy's cruiser is still nearly two days away. The dead are in the streets, the T-Virus is in the water, one cure exists, and the missile falls at sunrise on 1 October. A night is won by getting out before it does.
A fan-made design concept by Johnny Kestler for a professional portfolio. It is not for sale and has no connection to Capcom; Resident Evil and its characters, places, and names belong to Capcom.
This page is the way in. It says what the game is in ten minutes, and where to read next. The other documents are a specification: they are written so that anyone could build the game, or write a scene in it, without inventing a rule. They are dense on purpose. Read this first.
One Night
- You wake alone. A bed in a stranger's apartment, a desk in a dentist's office, a stalled subway car. You do not know where you are, what day it is, or who you are, and outside the city is screaming. Then a voice, small, from a grey cellular phone of 1998 beside you, its screen reading NO SERVICE, a cord running to a single earbud: Put it in your ear. When you do, a stranger tells you to get out of that room or die in it, and when you ask who she is, says only: Call me M. She never lies. She leaves out almost everything, including what she is.
- Four days pass. About an hour of the city's time for each minute of the night. The sun rises and sets over Raccoon City, rain comes and goes, and the city's sound changes from sirens and gunfire on the 28th to silence on the 30th (The Worlds, The Four Days).
- The story happens around you. Jill flees through Uptown with the Nemesis behind her. Brad Vickers dies at the R.P.D. gate, or does not, if someone pulls him away. Mikhail Viktor makes his last stand on a tram. Leon and Claire crash in Downtown at 22:00 on the 29th. William Birkin hunts beneath the station. You can watch it, help it, or break it, and every night it breaks differently (Story Nights and the People of the Records, The People of Raccoon City, 1998).
- The virus is a clock inside your body. A bite starts it. About forty minutes later, without a cure, you turn. No bar shows it: you read it on your own skin, and others read it on yours (The Infection).
- One cure, never enough. The bitten are given a road to a dose of Elpis. Six doses serve sixty-four survivors, and each one falls where anyone can run for it (Elpis in the Night).
- Strangers, then a squad. No one arrives in a team. You offer a stranger your hand, and if they take it you are a squad, up to four. Every squadmate who gets out infected costs the rest (Survivor, Squads).
- Too few seats. When the signal rises, ways out open across the city, the Subway, the Clock Tower helicopter, the R.P.D. roof, with one seat for every four or five survivors. Twenty minutes later the missile falls with the sun (The Extraction).
- Losing keeps you in the night. A survivor who turns plays on as a Licker, a Crimson Head, a J'avo, hunting the living, with no way left to win (The Turned).
To see one night from the inside, read Narrative Illustrations next, or A Night, Played for a whole night played minute by minute.
What Makes It Resident Evil
| Resident Evil | In Resident Evil Online |
|---|---|
| Raccoon City | Rebuilt whole as it stood in September 1998: the R.P.D. with every lock and statue, the medallions and the goddess in its hall, the sewers, NEST, Raccoon Park and the St. Michael Clock Tower, Kendo's gun shop, J's Bar (The Worlds) |
| Its people and its story | Jill, Carlos, Mikhail, Nikolai, Brad, Leon, Claire, Ada, HUNK, Marvin, Kendo, Ben, Irons, Annette Birkin, and the eight of Outbreak, each on the thread the records gave them, each able to be saved, followed, or lost (The People of Raccoon City, 1998) |
| Its monsters | The Nemesis in every night, the T-00, William Birkin rising form after form, zombies, Lickers, Hunters, Crimson Heads, the dogs (The Dead and the Engineered) |
| Its viruses | The T-Virus, the G-Virus, and four more of the series' viruses, each changing what a carrier gains, loses, and becomes (The Strains) |
| Survival horror | Scarce ammunition, herbs and sprays, a few inventory slots, safe rooms with a typewriter and a lamp, puzzles, and a world that does not want you armed (Survival) |
| Its ending | The missile at sunrise on 1 October, exactly as the records end it (The People of Raccoon City, 1998, The Last Morning) |
| Its villains' legacy | The intelligence that runs every night was built from Umbrella's own records, by people who walked out of Raccoon City with them (Pithos, ΜΝΗΜΗ) |
Is It Just Another Extraction Shooter?
No. It borrows one thing from extraction games: a night is won by getting out. Almost everything that defines those games is missing on purpose.
| An extraction shooter | Resident Evil Online | |
|---|---|---|
| What you bring in | Gear you own, risked every raid | Nothing. Everyone wakes empty-handed |
| What you keep | What you carry out | Nothing found. What stays is what happened, your Ledger, and how hardened your body has become |
| The main threat | Other players | The dead, the virus, and the Heavy. Fighting the living is possible, never required |
| What you fight over | Loot | One cure, and a seat |
| What you cannot see | Where the enemy is | Who is bitten. Cloth hides a bite until the lines reach the face |
| How it ends | You leave when you choose | The missile ends the city for everyone |
| What you remember | What you looted | Who lied about a bite, who took the dose, who was left at the door |
It is not a battle royale either: nothing shrinks, no one has to be last, and as many win as there are seats. The honest name for it is a survival horror game for sixty-four strangers, won by leaving (Audience and Genre, Is It a New Genre?).
Who Runs the Night
Every night is directed by ΜΝΗΜΗ, an intelligence built from the records of every outbreak, who rebuilds Raccoon City night after night to learn what people do in it. Survivors know her as M, the voice in the phone. She is bound by five Laws, among them that every consequence she causes has a visible cause and that pressure falls on places, never on a person picked out. And she never lies. She can tell a survivor where a box of shells lies loose, twice a night. She will never tell them who is bitten (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, ΜΝΗΜΗ).
Who she is, who built her, and who the survivors really are is the game's secret. The documents keep it in The Sealed File, and the seasons would reveal it a piece at a time.
What Is New
Survivor is the one original mode of Resident Evil Online, Johnny Kestler's own design and new to the franchise (Project Overview, Why Survivor). The series' familiar modes, Outbreak, Mercenaries, and Versus, are designed too, and kept for after launch (Future Development). Of everything in Survivor, one thing has no precedent in any multiplayer survival, extraction, or battle royale game: the story night, a canonical Resident Evil story playing out live among strangers, breakable by any of them, and different every night.
Where to Read Next
Fifteen minutes. Narrative Illustrations: one night, seen through one survivor.
Forty minutes: one night, played. A Night, Played: a whole Survivor night, from the queue to the After-Action Report, played by one ordinary player, with every system in motion.
An hour: the game.
- Survivor: the mode, squads, companions, and how a night is won.
- Story Nights and the People of the Records and The People of Raccoon City, 1998: the story of Raccoon City, act by act and person by person.
- The Infection, then Elpis in the Night: the clock in the body and the cure.
- The Extraction: the ways out, the seats, and the missile.
- ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director: ΜΝΗΜΗ, her Laws, and what she will and will not tell you.
- Dilemmas: where the rules make strangers choose between each other, with worked examples.
The whole specification. In order: Project Overview (the rules of these documents and their terms), then the lore (part 01), the core systems (02), the worlds (03), the mode (04), the story nights (05), the Service (06), feasibility (07), future development (08), and last, the Sealed File (09). Launch Scope says which parts are the launch.
If you doubt it would work. Audience and Genre tests it against what Resident Evil's fans have wanted and refused online. Market Precedents sets it beside the games that succeeded and failed. The Business Case costs it honestly, and says it is a bet on a large hit.
How the Documents Are Written
They use two registers. The Night is the fiction, where a player is a survivor and a session is a night. The Service is the product: matchmaking, prices, servers. Every feature of the Service has a face in the Night. The terms are defined in Project Overview, Terminology.