[Throughout this project, I will be handing over to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this one I am very pleased to introduce Stacey, who you can find on twitter as @thatstacey and whose smart video games writing I have been reading for years]
With over twenty years and a fancy remake between us and 1998’s Resident Evil 2, it can be challenging to recall just why it was so scary–why it hit such a nerve in 90s pop culture. After all, Resident Evil 2 was a juggernaut commercially, topping the charts in most countries and, as the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records put it, surpassing the revenue of “all but one Hollywood movie” the weekend of its release. This complete eclipse of games culture announced the arrival of Resident Evil as not just a curiosity, but a franchise to be spun-off, merchandised, and, of course, sequelized. Resident Evil 2 was not the first Resident Evil game, but in the minds of many, it would be the definitive Resident Evil game for years to come.
Resident Evil 2 was the James Cameron-style sequel to the original Resident Evil. Where Resident Evil was a mild genre success, Resident Evil 2 spilled the original mansion’s Romero-style horrors into the streets of Raccoon City. It introduced ambitious “A” and “B” scenarios that used the same save data for its characters to intersect at storybeats and share key items. Furthermore, new heroes Leon and Claire felt more engaged with what players were doing than their predecessors did. Improvements on the first game meant their gaze now followed enemies and interesting items they passed, as if they too couldn’t believe how much more there was to take in. The stakes were higher, and Resident Evil 2 conquered the zeitgeist.
And yet, upon revisiting the game in 2020, a year after its fantastic remake, I don’t think it was these technical expansions that seared Resident Evil 2 into the public consciousness. While its distinctive, then-state-of-the-art zombies shambled their way into many nightmares, I find myself drawn to the brilliant, maddening, quintessentially-nineties-survival-horror controls.
Yes, we’re going to talk about tank controls.
Tank controls, for the uninitiated, is a control schema in which the top button on the d-pad is always forward, regardless of what direction your character is facing. The down button always triggers a (slower) backward walk, and the right and left are used to face the character in the direction you actually wish to move. See an escape route to the left but Leon’s facing right? You have to use your left or right arrows to swing him around and then hit up to cheese it.
(Future games would at least introduce a button prompt for those quick 180 turns, but not Resident Evil 2.)
No one likes tank controls. I would guess that the developers of Resident Evil 2 also don’t enjoy tank controls. Yet millions of people in 1998 sat in front of their Playstations to fight through them. They didn’t respond to these controls with immersion-breaking frustration en masse. The game still scared them in spite of those controls–or maybe because of them.
The original Resident Evil introduced its players to the system fairly methodically. Players are given explicit instructions to roam the halls of the mansion, getting a handle on navigation before encountering their first ghoul. That encounter is nerve wracking, but it’s ultimately self-contained and sets player expectations. Resident Evil 2 offers no such respite. On their first playthrough, after a dramatic tanker truck explosion, the player is given control of Leon with zombies closing in from all sides. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the disorienting tank controls. This trap is set even for veteran Resident Evil players, because no experience can actually prepare you for tank controls. They’re fundamentally unintuitive.
That unintuitive nature is also what makes it quintessentially Resident Evil. The sudden panic of trying to remember how to do something as basic as move in the face of imminent danger becomes both a source of abject terror and an approximation of suspense. The terror roots itself in the game’s refusal to let Leon just go left like every instinct tells us he should. It is an approximation of suspense because suspense as a narrative function is something gameplay cannot completely reproduce.
To be clear: this is not because games are somehow incapable of narrative. While Resident Evil 2 broke out in 1998, we are not in 1998 and should, therefore, not relitigate the ludology versus narratology debate. We can accept that games can tell great stories and adapt long-standing narrative techniques to do so. That said, suspense is, in many ways, temporal. It is reliant on a viewer/reader receiving information at a specific point, and utilizing that dreadful knowledge later in the story. Outside of the more traditionally-narrative cutscenes, Resident Evil 2 has limited control over what a player will interact with and when, and must therefore approximate that suspense spatially through player performance and traversal. For all its pixel gore, Resident Evil 2 creates the most tension in the mundane where players are suddenly burdened with the knowledge of their own shortcomings. Basic movement is arbitrarily hindered; inventory space is limited; decisions must be made in the moment-to-moment.
The latter decisions are made all the more difficult in Resident Evil 2 with the knowledge that if you grab a gun in your A scenario, you won’t be able to use it when you come through again in your B scenario. While its use of A and B paths is indeed ambitious for the time, the scenarios serve the same function here as the tank controls to create that feeling of, if not fear, then panic. It’s not just a fear of what monster lurks behind the next door, but a feeling of dread–suspense even. It’s an uncertainty that the decisions we make now will actually prepare us to face that monster beyond the door, and whatever follows it. One false move with those tank controls, though, and all that anguish is for nought.
Now having spent entirely too many words exalting the merits of tank controls, it should be noted that both of these core systems that make up the Resident Evil 2 experience–the tank controls and branching story–were dropped for the remake. This would seem to be an argument against their significance, and there were some objections from fans about the remake omitting the complexities of the old A and B scenarios. There was not, however, outcry over the lack of tank controls. This is mostly because, and I can’t stress this enough, no one likes them. However, the remake doesn’t need tank controls to capture what they ultimately contributed to Resident Evil 2–what arguably made that journey to Raccoon City harrowing for so many players back in 1998. The remake now has the graphical prowess to cinematically light cramped corridors that serve a similar purpose. Basic movement is now restricted not by the d-pad, but by close quarters and disorienting darkness. Leon will still have those zombies closing in on him, and now the ability to hit left and actually run to the left won’t necessarily save him. Whether with tank controls or just invoking them in spirit, Resident Evil 2‘s panicked, beating heart remains after all these years.
