It was a secret the entire gaming world had been privy to for nearly two decades, but Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami would only admit to it in an October 2014 interview with the daily newspaper Le Monde: his most celebrated work, one that would go on to spawn a new, wildly popular genre, had been heavily inspired by French horror adventure Alone in the Dark. Without it, he conceded, his landmark survival-horror game would probably have ended up as a first-person shooter.
Even that belated confession, focusing mainly on visual design—perspective and camera placement—rather downplayed the similarities between the two legendary horror titles, from the zombie-infested mansion setting to the choice of an underpowered protagonist, and from the awkward tank controls to the memorable scenes featuring window-crashing hellhounds. One can trace earlier precursors to survival horror: Project Firestart on the Commodore 64 and Capcom’s own Sweet Home on the NES. But Alone in the Dark, published in 1992 by an ailing Infogrames, became the first game to provide the complete template for the genre, lacking nothing save a world-conquering platform like the PlayStation to anticipate Resident Evil’s seismic impact.
