The original and un-remade Resident Evil trilogy is officially coming to PC for the first time since their CD-ROM ports, and Resident Evil 1 is available now.
GOG announced the good news early this morning with the surprise shadow drop of Resident Evil The First. The survival horror game that kicked off the series' zombie-stabbing, boulder-punching, and witch-thirsting shenanigans originally debuted on PS1 in 1996 before receiving a largely faithful GameCube remake in 2002. That remake was later high-definitioned and ported to modern platforms, which is probably why I had to blink twice when I saw the news above.
"The good news does not end on Resident Evil 1," the storefront tweeted. "Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 are both coming soon to GOG, and you can pre-purchase them in our convenient bundle containing all three Resident Evil games!"
Resident Evils 2 and 3 were also, of course, remade in more dramatic fashion recently, swapping the original static cameras and tank controls for tighter third-person views that feel like you're practically breathing on the protagonist's shoulders. Expect a very different kinda horror if this is your first time with the classics.
My favorite thing about this announcement is actually the GOG pages themselves (you can check out Resident Evil 1 here or the trilogy's bundle here.) GOG itself has an amazing game preservation initiative, but in this case, GOG also preserved "how Resident Evil was described to gamers when it launched all those years ago." Publisher Capcom sold the game as "completely uncut" with "unprecedented detail-intense text maps" and two protagonists "both bought to life with realistic polygon character graphics," which is a cute throwback. Oh, and the original live-action intro is waiting to be witnessed on the storefront (and above this paragraph) too if you want to see 1996 encapsulated in four minutes.
Resident Evil's PC re-release also has a few extra improvements with a better "timing of the cutscenes," "game video player," "game registry settings," and full support for all the modern controllers you'd expect. The GOG release includes all four originally localized languages too: English, German, French, and Japanese.
See where (or if) the originals placed in our 10 best Resident Evil games of all-time ranking.
