Between unusually candid developers and an obsessive fan community that has spent years unearthing franchise history, we know that the classic Resident Evil games we love and cherish are the final survivors of a wild, iterative development process. The road to the 1996 original BIOHAZARD is practically unrecognizable, thanks to first person perspectives and cyborg supersoldiers. The creative partnership between director Shinji Mikami and his collaborator Hideki Kamiya would both shape and derail some of the most fascinating games Capcom never released. Games like Resident Evil 1.5.
It wasn’t actually called that, of course. Back in 1996 it would have been considered Resident Evil 2 within the offices of Capcom. The studio had quickly greenlit a sequel following the surprise success of the first game, and tapped Kamiya to take the lead. For this second chapter, he envisioned Raccoon City itself under siege from the zombie swarms, with rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy trapped inside the police headquarters with a motorcycle-riding college student as his co-protagonist.
Sounds familiar, right? But that’s about where the similarities between it and the Resident Evil 2 we’ve played end. The police station Kamiya built was a shiny, fluorescent-lit modern station house rather than the sprawling converted museum of the iconic RPD. Zombies would have fewer polygons, but come in greater onscreen numbers, while characters wore armor and accumulated visible damage. Chief Irons was an avuncular authority figure, while Claire Redfield was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the star of the second disc was slated to be Elza Walker, a blond biker with no ties to first-game hero Chris.
The game was extremely far along in development when Mikami, who had taken on the role of producer and had been watching from a distance, finally tasted what Kamiya was cooking and sent it back to the kitchen. By all accounts the game was boring, samey, and bland, with ugly zombies and uninspired architecture. Kamiya himself later admitted that he wasn’t up to the challenge, so he called in a ringer: veteran tokusatsu writer Noboru Sugimura, best known for penning Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, the Super Sentai series that would later become Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Sugimura was a huge fan of the first game, and agreed to come aboard and craft the Resident Evil 2 we know today.
But how do we know so much about a game we were never supposed to see? Well, we actually saw quite a lot of it. Unlike most lost games, the unravelling of what we now call “Resident Evil 1.5” was extraordinarily public. Magazine coverage, trade show appearances, and promotional videos kept coming even after the game had already been axed internally. We were still seeing footage of the game as late as December of 1997, with the completely different, final version of Resident Evil 2 just one month out from release. Remnants survived in unexpected places: cut content on a Director’s Cut bonus disc, leftover assets buried in an early RE2 demo, all of which became essential when fans eventually went looking.
A scene coalesced around the mysterious missing Resi game, flooding forums with rumors, hoaxes, and an all-encompassing search for builds that preservationists were convinced existed somewhere in the wild. In 2011, hunters traced a prototype version to a deceased Capcom employee’s estate sale and pooled $8,000 to acquire it, but instead of releasing it to the public, they kept it to themselves
The group, known as Team IGAS (“I’ve Got a Shotgun”), promised to shape the roughly 40% complete data into something playable before sharing it with the world, which did not go over well with the die-hards who had spent decades lusting after it. Some fans wanted Kamiya’s original “Pure Vanilla Build” preserved perfectly for posterity. Others were content to wait for a reconstruction. Many were still chasing something else entirely: the mythical “80% build,” the nearly-finished version that caused Mikami to pull the plug. This extremely nerdy standoff ended when a leaker took the decision out of IGAS’ hands entirely and released the build publicly in 2013.
Today, Resident Evil 1.5 is the rarest kind of lost media: one you can actually experience. The build is fully playable, though not beatable, and the community reconstruction efforts are ongoing. Nearly three decades after its demise, the resurrected corpse of Resident Evil 1.5 still isn’t finished with us.
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