Capcom’s 1996 horror game was called Biohazard in Japan, but a forgotten DOS game and a New York hardcore punk band already held that name in the West, so an internal contest produced Resident Evil. This episode follows that accidental brand from Tokuro Fujiwara and Shinji Mikami’s modest goal of updating the 1989 haunted-house game Sweet Home into a franchise with more than 213 million games sold, a $1.2 billion film series, stage musicals in Japan, and a claim to reviving the modern zombie.

Along the way we look at why the original PlayStation’s limits forced pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed cameras, how tank controls turned vulnerability into fear, and how the series kept mutating: the over-the-shoulder action of Resident Evil 4, the first-person dread of Resident Evil 7 and Village, the remake era, and the 2026 mainline entry Requiem. We also dig into the Umbrella Corporation lore, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alice movies, S.D. Perry’s off-script novels, and why filmmakers from Alex Garland to George A. Romero credit the game with making zombies scary again.

• How a punk band trademark dispute led Capcom to rename Biohazard for Western audiences
• Why fixed camera angles and tank controls were a hardware workaround that became a psychological weapon
• How Resident Evil 4 abandoned the formula and shaped third-person shooters from Gears of War to The Last of Us
• Why Alice, a character who never appeared in the games, carried six films past $1.2 billion at the box office
• How the shift from voodoo curses to lab-engineered viruses matched 1990s anxieties about cloning, Ebola, and biotech