A PEGI rating for the OG 1996 Resident Evil has me once again preparing to enter the world of survival horror

Those Resident Evil remakes are great. Really great. But you know what’s better? Original Resident Evil. Well, kinda. Look, I’ll admit it, basically every RE remake Capcom has put out has been a banger, improving on the games they’re based on in all sorts of clever ways, but there’s still part of me that yearns for the janky, badly voiced charm of the original PS1 games. Perhaps ‘better’ is the wrong word, but important? Iconic? Nostalgic? Original RE is all of these things and more.

So it’s with no small excitement that I tell you that the original 1996 Resident Evil just got a mysterious new PC PEGI rating (via Gematsu), suggesting something is going on with the game, and it seems likely to me that something is a release of some kind. You can find it yourself by searching ‘Resident Evil’ on PEGI’s website, where the listing still seems to be live at time of writing. There’s violence in it, apparently. News to me. 

Now, you might be wondering what the big deal is. After all, Resident Evil 1 has been available on Steam for years. Thing is, that’s a touched-up remaster of the Gamecube remake, not the original 1996 version of the game. That PlayStation version did get a Windows release in the same year, but it’s never made its way to digital storefronts. A random pop-up on the PEGI website doesn’t necessarily mean anything, of course, but it strikes me that it could well indicate the older version of the game is due for a re-release.

There were actually two versions of OG RE: The one that came out first and its Director’s Cut version, which mixes up stuff like item and enemy placement across the Spencer Mansion. The PEGI rating doesn’t give much indication as to which version it refers to. Given that the version you can get on PS4 and PS5 is the Director’s Cut, though, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t that one.

It’s pure speculation on my part, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for modernisation if this is a digital release of the original RE. I suspect it just means someone at Capcom realised the company had a PC game in its back-catalogue that it might as well release on Steam, rather than any kind of whizzbang remaster. Still, I’d be very happy to see the classic get preserved (legally) on PC, and if it means we might see RE2 and RE3 digital releases sometime down the line? Even better.

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