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Kombat
’s “Finish him!” finale scenes) or iteratively (the mow-’em-down mindlessness of just about everything else). The violence of
Resident Evil
was surprisingly occasional but unbelievably brutal. It was also clinical, which encouraged a certain wicked tendency to experiment. As you found and used new weapons, it turned out that zombies reacted to them in varied ways. A shotgun could blow the legs out from under a zombie, and the well-placed round of a .38 could take its head right off. I do not claim to be a historian of video-game dismemberment, but I am fairly sure that no game before
Resident Evil
allowed such violence to be done to specific limbs. It provided gamers with one of the video-game form’s first laboratories of virtual sadism, and I would be lying if I did not admit that it was, in its way, exhilarating. (They were
zombies
. You were doing them a
favor.)
    But
Resident Evil
was influential in a final, lamentable way, and this has to do with its phenomenal stupidity. How stupid was
Resident Evil?
So stupid that stupidity has since become one of the signatures of the
Resident Evil
series. So stupid, in other words, that stupidity became something not to address or fix but a mast of tonal distinction to which the series lashed itself. I have already quoted some of the game’s dialogue, which at its least weird sounds as though it has been translated out of Japanese, into Swahili, back into Japanese, into the language of the Lunar Federation, back into Japanese, and finally into English. As for the plot, I have played through the game at least half a dozen times and could not under pain of death explain its most rudimentary aspects. I know that the plot provides a stage for the considerable malversation of your erstwhile teammate Wesker. I also know that it involves an evil corporation known as Umbrella and a terrible biotoxin known as the T-virus. This is where the cinematic sweepand texture of
Resident Evil
least resemble cinema. Great horror movies are almost always subterranean in effect. They are the ultimate compulsion
—you must watch
—and they transubstantiate social anxieties more sensed than felt. The sensed, rather than the felt, is the essence of the horror film. Another way of saying this is that good horror films are
about
something not immediately discernible on their surface. On its surface,
Resident Evil
is about an evil corporation known as Umbrella and a terrible biotoxin known as the T-virus. Beneath that surface is a tour de force of thematic nullity. All the game really wants to do is frighten you silly, and it goes about doing so with considerable skill. Playing it for the first time was easily as scary as any horror movie and frequently much scarier. But was it horrifying? For me, horror is the departure of conscious thought, and
Resident Evil
collapses wherever thought arrives.
    This brilliantly conceived game of uncompromising stupidity was, in retrospect, a disastrous formal template. Terrible dialogue? It was still a great game. A constant situational ridiculousness that makes
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
seem like a restrained portrait of rural dysfunction? It was still a great game. And it
is
a great game, and will be ever thus. It was eventually remade, more than once, most notably for release on the Nintendo GameCube, with better graphics and voice actors and a script translated by someone who had occasionally heard spoken English. It, too, was a great game. But the success of the first
Resident Evil
established the
permissibility
of a great game that happened to be stupid. This set the tone for half a decade of savagely unintelligent games and helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation, and characterization. In accounting for this state of affairs, many game designers have, over the years,claimed that gamers do not much think about such highfaluting