It feels strange to mark the passage of time by howotherthings age.
Resident Evil 2 is 25 years old.
How is it that it released the same year assembly of the International Space Station began?
It was the kind of forbidden game I craved.
It was a game other children, with more permissive childhoods, could get, but not me.
Or so I thought.
Resident Evil was a good game, but sometimes it was good because it wasbad.)
Resident Evil 2 proved Capcom could do it better.
One hesitates to call it a better time, but it was simpler.
But I don’t.
Fear of the unknown, something to which we can all relate.
The game froze you in time and asked you not to fight, but to survive.
You’re stuck in one place and hoping to make it through.
Somehow, though 25 years have passed, so much remains the same in the world.
That’s probably not a good thing.
Within it I can still see the horrors of my own life.
Perhaps that’s why I struggle with recent entries.
Resident Evil 2, like all good horror, focussed on the very real horrors of our then-present.
The ethics of advancing science, the dangers of capitalism, and the feeling of being trapped.
We know time dilates based on our own perception.
It flies when we have fun, it crawls when we’re unhappy.
But so, too, does our vision of time already passed.
It’s not a surprise that Resident Evil 2 is 25 because 1998 feels close.
It’s surprising because, for so many, not much has changed in a quarter of a century.
25 years ago we might have thought 2023 would be utopic, a product of miraculous advancement.
And Resident Evil 2, for all its links to the past, feels remarkably relevant in the present.
