There were two big surprises when Resident Evil Requiem debuted at Summer Games Fest. One was the timing of its appearance, coming roughly 17 minutes after executive producer Jun Takeuchi asked us to wait a little longer. The other was how Requiem draws on a strange, almost-forgotten corner of the Resident Evil franchise.
If you’re an old-school RE fan, this article probably won’t tell you anything that you don’t already know. However, Resident Evil has been on an upswing for the last few years, which has brought a lot of new fans to the series. This is primarily meant for them.
Who is Grace Ashcroft?
The Requiem trailer introduced us to Grace Ashcroft, a young FBI agent who’s sent to visit the site of her mother Alyssa’s murder. For anyone who was playing RE 20 years ago, that instantly set off alarm bells.
Alyssa Ashcroft, a reporter for a local newspaper in Raccoon City, was one of eight playable characters in 2004’s Resident Evil Outbreak and its sequel, 2005’s File #2. Both were a unique online spin on the original survival horror formula where you could team with up to three other players to survive one of 10 scenarios set during the death of Raccoon City. This included the chance to revisit several key locations from the original versions of Resident Evil 2, 3, and Zero, such as Umbrella’s underground laboratories, the Raccoon Hospital, and the police station.
Outbreak initially sold very well off the strength of the Resident Evil name, but had famously terrible load times. It was also a PlayStation 2 exclusive, so to access online play, you had to buy a special network adapter. (Some territories, such as Australia, didn’t even get that.) If you did, Outbreak had its own famously janky lobby/matchmaking systems and, in a peculiar decision by the developers, didn’t have voice chat.
While File #2 fixed a lot of the first game’s mechanical issues and had better overall scenario design, word had already gotten around about Outbreak’s shortcomings. As a result, File #2 bombed in most markets, which reportedly put a stop to Capcom’s plans to continue the series. Some previews from the time suggested there were another 10 scenarios in planning stages, five of which could be partially accessed by using a Game Shark on the File #2 disc.
Capcom subsequently released Resident Evil 4 in 2005, which put a hard stop to the RE franchise’s classic era. Outbreak was subsequently allowed to fall into relative obscurity, to the point where it wasn’t clear if the games were an actual part of the series’ canon.
Since then, fan opinion has turned around on Outbreak. The online RE series’ biggest issue might be that they simply came out too early and/or on the wrong platform. If Outbreak had been released as an early Xbox Live title, for example, it might’ve had a warmer reception. As it was, Outbreak was an ambitious project that released on a console that wasn’t really suited for it.
12 years after File #2’s release, Alyssa Ashcroft made a cameo appearance in Resident Evil 7 as the author of a newspaper article that can be found in the main house on the Bakers’ estate. This made her the only confirmed survivor from Outbreak, as well as the only conclusive proof that fans ever got about Outbreak’s canonicity.
Now, Requiem appears to be a story about Alyssa’s daughter, partially set in the bombed-out ruins of Raccoon City. According to producer Masachika Kawata during the June 26th Capcom Direct, RE9 is set 30 years after the original disaster, placing it around 2028.
In addition to being a celebration of the franchise’s 30th anniversary, Requiem is another useful example of how there are no truly dead plot threads in Resident Evil. While there are dozens of dropped plots and characters throughout series history, Capcom routinely dives into its back catalog to find stories. If the next mainline entry in RE is, of all things, a follow-up to the Outbreak games, maybe your own favorite one-shot character has a chance to make their own return.