To recapture intimate horror, Resident Evil 7 devs looked to the '90s

- Resident Evil 7 executive producer Jun Takeuchi on how his team reinvented Resident Evil while also bringing the series back to its roots.

In the first video of a multipart ‘Making Of’ series, several developers from Capcom trace Resident Evil 7 back to its origins and recount the different decisions and conversations that led them to reignite the series’ survival horror spark.

The video above offers a look at some of the original concepts that powered Resident Evil 7, and also speaks with some developers who have been with Capcom since the early days of Resident Evil to explore how, in many ways, redefining the Resident Evil series was also bringing it back to its roots. 

Earlier plans for Resident Evil 7 saw it as something conceptually similar to the more action-orientated games in the series, like Resident Evil 6. But it wasn’t until Jun Takeuchi joined the team as executive producer that the game began to carve out its place in survival horror.

He ultimately wanted the game that combined the best parts of the Resident Evil series with new ideas and technology to recapture the feeling of classic horror the series had quietly walked away from in the decades since its inception.

“I worked on the original Resident Evil and on that project we focused on how to make players experience horror in an intimate way.”

He explained that Resident Evil games had been expanding in size since the success of Resident Evil 4 and he felt that this newest game would need to reduce its scope to focus on a “narrow and deep” experience.

“It was less about changing how I work, and more about reminding myself how we worked back in the day, using that to make a game on a smaller scale but has lots of depth,” explained Takeuchi. “The concept was to allow players to feel an intimate kind of fear and survival horror; like its actually happening to them.”

Take a look at the video above for more on Resident Evil 7’s inspirations, and for more on the game’s development be sure to check out the fan translation of the Japanese Biohazard 7: Resident Evil Inside Report book as well.