Extra Lives (4 page)

The load screen complete, Jill now stands in a long narrow hallway. The camera looks down upon her from an angle of perhaps seventy degrees, which leaves you unable to see either ahead of or behind her. You turn her left, instinctively, only to hear something farther down the hall. You hear…
chewing?
No. It is worse than that. It is a wet, slushy sound, more like
feasting
than chewing. The camera has shifted yet again, allowing you to look down the
hall but not around the corner, whence this gluttonous feasting sound originates. There is no music, no cues at all. The gameworld is silent but for your footsteps and the sound you now realize you have been set upon this path to encounter. You panic and run down to the other end of the hall, the feasting sound growing fainter, only to find two locked doors. No choice, then. You walk (not run) back toward the hallway corner, then stop and go to a subscreen to check your inventory. Your pistol’s ammunition reserves are paltry, and you curse yourself for having shot off so many bullets in the dining room. You also have a knife. You toggle back and forth between pistol and knife, equipping and unequipping. You eventually go with the pistol and leave the inventory screen.

Jill stands inches before the hallway corner, but it suddenly feels as though it is you standing before hellmouth itself. Your body has become a hatchery from which spiderlings of dread erupt and skitter. Part of this is merely expectation, for you know that a zombie is around that corner and you are fairly certain it is eating Chris. Another part is…you are not sure you can name it. It is not quite the control-and-release tension of the horror film and it is not quite actual terror. It is something else, a fear you can control, to a point, but to which you are also helplessly subject—a fear whose electricity becomes pleasure.

You raise your pistol—and this is interesting: You
cannot move
while your pistol is raised. You had not noticed this before. You should be able to move with your pistol raised, and certainly you should be able to shoot while moving. That is another convention of the form. In video games, you can shoot your sluggish bullets while running, jumping, falling off a cliff, swimming underwater. On top of this you have exactly five rounds. Zombies are dispatched with headshots. You know that much. But how do you
shoot for the head when the game provides you with no crosshair? A “scary game” seems a far less laughable notion than it did only a few moments ago.

You turn the corner to yet another camera change. You have only a second or two to make out the particulars—a tiny room, a downed figure, another figure bent over him—before what is called a cut scene kicks in. The camera closes on a bald humanoid, now turning, noticing you, white head lividly veiny, mouth bloody, eyes flat and empty and purgatorial. There the brief cut scene ends. The zombie, now approaching, groans in thoughtless zombie misery, a half-eaten corpse behind it. You fire but nothing happens. In your panic you have forgotten the left trigger, which raises your weapon. This blunder has cost you. The zombie falls upon you with a groan and bites you avidly, your torso transforming into a blood fountain. You mash all seventeen of your controller’s buttons before finally breaking free. The zombie staggers back a few steps, and you manage to fire. Still no crosshair or reticule. Your shot misses, though by how much you have no idea. The zombie is upon you again. After pushing it away—and there is something date-rapeishly unwholesome about the way it assaults you—you stagger back into the hallway to give yourself more room to maneuver, but the camera switches in such a way as to leave you unaware of the zombie’s exact location, though you can still hear its awful, blood-freezing moan, which, disembodied, sounds not only terrifying but
sad
. You fire blindly down the hall, toward the moaning, with no guarantee that your shots are hitting the zombie or coming anywhere close to it. Soon pulling the trigger produces only spent clicks. You go to the inventory screen and equip your knife. When you return to gameplay, the zombie appears within frame and lurches forward. You slash at it, successfully, blood geysering everywhere, but not before it manages to grab on to you yet again. After another chewy struggle, you back
up farther, the camera finally providing you with a vantage point that is not actively frustrating, and you lure the zombie toward you, lunging when it staggers into stabbing range. At last the creature drops. You approach its doubly lifeless husk, not quite believing what is happening when it grabs your leg and begins, quite naturally by this point, to bite you. You stab at this specimen of undead indestructibility until, with a final anguished moan, a copious amount of blood pools beneath it. What new devilry is this?

None of it has made sense. Not the absurd paucity of your ammunition stores, not the handicapping camera system, not the amount of effort it took to defeat a single foe, not that foe’s ability to play dead. You know a few things about video-game enemies. When they are attacked they either die instantly or lose health, and for foes as tough as this one you are typically able to track the process by way of an onscreen health bar. This zombie, however, had no health bar. (Neither do you, properly speaking. What you do have is an electrocardiographic waveform that is green when you are at full health, orange when you are hurt, and red when you are severely hurt. Not only is this EKG stashed away in the inventory subscreen, it provides only an approximate state of health. Right now your health is red. But
how
red? You have no idea. This game is rationing not only resources but
information.)
When video-game characters die, furthermore, they disappear, like Raptured Christians or Jedi. Your assailant has not disappeared and instead remains facedown in a red pool of useless zombie plasma. This is a game in which every bullet, evidently, will count. This is also a game in which everything you kill will remain where it falls, at least until you leave the room. You stab it again. Revenge!

You flee the hallway and return to Barry. Before you can tell him what has happened, the door behind you opens. The zombie
whose deadness was a heliocentric certainty has followed you. You (not Jill:
you)
cry out in delighted shock. Your worried stepfather, a few rooms away, calls your name, his voice emanating from a world that, for the last half hour, has been as enclosing but indistinct as an amnion. After calling back that you are okay, you are newly conscious of the darkness around you, the lateness of the hour. For the first time in your life, a video game has done something more than entertain or distract you. It has bypassed your limbic system and gone straight for the spinal canal. You lean back, cautiously. You are twenty-three years old. You have played a lot of games. Right now, all those games, all the irrecoverable eons you have invested in them, seem to you, suddenly, like nothing more than a collective prologue.

The critic Robert Hughes called it “the shock of the new”: the sensation of encountering a creative work that knocks loose the familiar critical vocabularies and makes them feel only partially applicable to what stands before you. It is the powerful, powerless feeling of knowing your aesthetic world has been widened but not yet having any name for the new ground upon which you stand. Hughes was talking about visual art, but there is no reason to confine the shock of the new to any particular medium. When it comes to video games, the shock of the new came to me through Capcom’s
Resident Evil
, though other gamers will have their own equally resonant examples. The first time I played
Resident Evil
is the only instance in which I was acutely aware of being present at the birth of a genre (that of “survival horror”), and it was one of a handful of occasions that a medium I believed I understood felt objectively, qualitatively
new
—and not merely new to me.

At first glance
Resident Evil
seemed to be imitating horror films: the grindingly familiar character types; the shifting camera angles;
the elongated, tonal creepiness occasionally punctuated by sudden, decisive scares; the brilliant—absolutely
brilliant
—use of sound. But it also took core inspiration from primitive video-game progenitors. Much of
Resident Evil
involves finding objects (a lighter, herbs of various colors, sheet music, jewelry) and figuring out how to use them and where, a this-quest-opens-that-quest structure similar to some of the earliest text-based computer adventures, one of which was actually called
Adventure. Resident Evil
’s reliance on gunplay—it was originally envisioned as a first-person shooter—came from games too numerous to mention. When it was not borrowing horror-film decor,
Resident Evil
frequently resembled, as mentioned,
Myst
. None of these constituent parts was new, but the unlikely whole they formed was. No game had ever before combined so many disparate strands of popular entertainment; few had pointed more evocatively to what was possible within the video-game form.

Oddly, not many games chose to follow where
Resident Evil
pointed. Its innovations were selectively scavenged rather than swallowed whole, even within subsequent
Resident Evil
titles. The intentional clumsiness of the controls (cardiac-event-inducing when surrounded by shambling, moaning zombies) was abandoned by
Resident Evil 4
, as was the cinematically relocating camera. The former was dropped because it was no longer an interesting hindrance; gamers had learned to adapt to it. The latter was dropped because the game’s designers settled upon more direct ways to alarm gamers than by the obscurantism of shifting camera angles. In
Resident Evil 4
, they simply throw more enemies at you than you can ever hope to kill.

The innovations that did survive are a mixed bag. Most narrative games today require the player to “save” his or her progress. In early games you were often given a password to allow you to start where you last left off; later games did the saving for you,
automatically.
Resident Evil
’s save system—which involved, for some deeply mysterious reason, finding in-game typewriter ribbons, which one then used to save one’s progress on an in-game old-fashioned manual typewriter—was about as frustrating as typing on an out-of-game old-fashioned manual typewriter. You could save only in special typewriter-having locations, and your severely limited inventory space meant you could only carry so many items at once (fewer still if you picked Jill to control rather than brawny Chris), the upshot of which was spending half the game muttering profanities while running back and forth through rooms filled with undead to “save” rooms and then swapping out items to make space for your latest stumbled-upon typewriter ribbon and then running back to fetch it. Saving your game at every opportunity became an imperative as biologically intense as food or sleep. I have had friends and relatives die, lovers stray, and money run out, but I think I would still place being torn apart by zombies with an hour and a half of unsaved
Resident Evil
gameplay behind me in the upper quartile of Personally Miserable Experiences. While the satanically complicated save system certainly upped the tension of
Resident Evil
’s gameplay, it did so artificially, and for years a number of games, especially Japanese games, made saving one’s progress a similarly and uselessly time-consuming ordeal. This succeeded grandly in making games harder but did nothing to make them more enjoyable. (Ten years later, another Capcom zombie game,
Dead Rising
, would have an even more infuriating and niggardly save system. As much as I love
Dead Rising
, I still wish ill upon everyone involved with its save-system implementation. Honestly. Those people can go to hell.)

One of
Resident Evil
’s more influential innovations did not concern gameplay per se. Games were violent before
Resident Evil
, certainly,
but they were violent in two ways: operatically (as in
Mortal 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 sweep
and 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.