Assassins Creed has been criticised for causing the NPC to plummet, and many visual downgrades have launched campaigns of well-known artists to flee on the flaws of devs. This week, the Resident Evil 6s logo is turning a decade old.
The logo, of course, is quite innocuous in nature. Resident Evil is a game about viruses, and the logo is meant to resemble a virus under a microscope or whatever. I get it. I see it. However, back in the run-up to Resident Evils'' release, people discovered something altogether.
Even those of you who were not terminally online in 2012 probably see it as a giraffe BJ logo. Like a debauched Rorschach test, they saw a giraffe.
I''ve truly quite loved the horror of this time. Media outlets reported it with disbelief. I remember Twitter and forum users redew it with alarming clarity that I definitely will not link to or picture here. In the end, even Capcom quietly referenced its meme status in a few now long-gone social media posts.
During this era, Resident Evil was on one, the video game development equivalent of a person who had taken too much of it, leading to their brain running at a million miles an hour. Any doubt the series had to be grounded or down-to-earth had been ejected. Im apprehensive that the series didnt pull a Dino Crisis and send the zombies to space.
In this sense, the logos'' accidental hilarity tended to match up to what the series was at the time often unintentionally funny and misinterpreted, selling bucket-loads despite being on a path that was, lets be fair, pretty messy and a wee bit shady.
Thinking about the logo and the tenth anniversary of Resident Evil 6 brings into focus something else, too: how brave and clever Capcom was with its decision to tone things down and head straight back to basics for Resident Evil 7.
In situations like this, most game companies anticipate the iceberg coming. Despite Capcoms expectations, Resident Evil 6 was ultimately as successful as Resident Evil 5 had move over 8 million copies. What Capcoms expectations were, that made it at the time one of the best two Resident Evil games ever, and well inside Capcoms'' top five games of all time. The easy thing to make one, however, would have been to polish it more and avoid the embarrassing logo, as well as paying an exorbitant marketing charge
Capcom noticed the swinging while he squibbed to the giraffe in social media posts and made an adjustment. The coming iceberg of people dreading a balls-to-the-wall, stupid, not very scary Resident Evil was snarled around with style and substance. Ten years later, its difficult to see the decisions taken in the wake of RE6 as anything less than genius.
That sentiment has been rewarded. Resident Evil 7 is now selling 11 million copies, but the similarly stripped-back Resident Evil 2 remake is closing in on 10 million copies. Resident Evil is now on the top of the Capcoms all-time best-selling list. So far, none of the logos has been like a sex act. RE9 is based on the idea.
