Resident Evil Outbreak

~ the eulogy ~

The European release of Resident Evil Outbreak had no online mode in it. Capcom shipped it into PAL territories on 17 September 2004 with the servers stripped out, which is how Turkey got it and how the rest of the continent got it too. The design was four people trying to survive a city coming apart around them, and the version sold across an entire region could only be played alongside two computer-controlled partners who did not answer.

Everywhere else it was the first Resident Evil with cooperative play and online multiplayer, which in 2003 was a serious bet on a console nobody associated with the internet. It came out of Capcom Production Studio 1 under producers Noritaka Funamizu and Katsuhiro Sudo, one of three PlayStation 2 network games the studio was building at the same time, sitting next to Auto Modellista and the original Monster Hunter. You needed a broadband line and a network adapter clipped into the back of the PS2 to get to any of it.

The mechanic that made it worth the trouble was the virus gauge. Every character started the scenario already infected, and the counter climbed the whole time you played. Take enough damage and you collapsed and started crawling while the number accelerated, and somebody had to spend a herb or pull you up to slow it. If it reached the top online, you turned into a zombie and kept playing, still in control of your character, now hunting the three people you had spent the last half hour helping.

It sold 1.45 million copies by August 2006, which cleared the million Capcom had wanted from the network experiment. Monster Hunter cleared it too. The difference between those two, over the following twenty years, did not come down to which one was better in 2004.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ad-lib system ~

There was no voice chat. Capcom built what it called the ad-lib system instead: a set of lines and gestures your character could fire off, mapped to a menu, so you could point at a door or call for help without ever hearing another player's voice. Press a button and Kevin says something in Kevin's voice, in the voice actor's recording, in whatever language the disc was pressed in.

Reviewers hated it, and the criticism was fair on its own terms. Coordinating four people through a fixed vocabulary in a game where the timing matters is a losing proposition, and Eurogamer and others said so at the time. It also meant nobody could yell at you. Two decades of online co-op later, a game where the only thing your teammates can do is gesture at a locked door is not an obviously worse experience than the alternative.

~ 2007, then 2011 ~

Capcom announced the western shutdown in March 2007 and pulled the North American servers on 31 December that year, a little under four years after the game launched in Japan and under three from the American release. Japan kept running. The Japanese servers stayed up until 30 June 2011, when Capcom closed out a batch of PlayStation 2 network services together, taking Outbreak and File #2 off with them.

Nothing dramatic ended it. The PS2 network business had been a sideline that never grew into anything, the hardware was two generations behind by 2011, and the servers were being kept alive for a population Capcom could presumably count. What is worth noting is the gap. A Japanese player had three and a half more years with this game than an American one, and a European player never had a single minute of it.

~ the fans put the servers back ~

In January 2014 a group of players brought the online mode back, ten years after release and two and a half after Capcom switched it off. They reverse-engineered the protocol and stood up their own servers, and Kotaku wrote it up on 4 January 2014 under a headline about fans bringing the game back. Outbreak has now been running on volunteer infrastructure for longer than it ever ran on Capcom's in North America. The company has never acknowledged this and has never tried to stop it.

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