Link: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/resident-evil/when-capcom-brought-in-a-professional-screenwriter-for-the-original-resident-evil-2-it-was-his-idea-to-fully-embrace-the-series-goofy-puzzles-well-just-have-to-make-the-police-chief-a-weirdo/

In an alternate timeline, Resident Evil could've become a lot more serious.

At first people were saying, 'This isn’t very realistic', but I replied that reality depends on persuasion and belief, so as long as everything was consistent, it would appear real."

They didn't just change the existing game. At the time, resident evil 2 was almost finished and, based on the screenwriters feedback, they scrapped the whole game and started over. Apparently you can get a leaked build of the original game, usually called resident evil 1.5 but it's not very good.

The story of 1.5 is absolutely insane. Here's a really well made documentary style video about it. There's so many people that got their hands on the build of the game and refused to make it public because they wanted to extort money from the community, make a name for themselves by "fixing" the game, or just wanting to be a special lil boy who has the only copy on a rotting disc.

The Unreleased Game That Ruined Lives - A Resident Evil Story

Oh, the video must be region locked or something. They have a "global reupload" so maybe this link will work? If it doesn't, the video is called The Unreleased Game That Ruined Lives - A Resident Evil Story by the channel LiussGaming if you want to search for it

https://youtu.be/hzqNDDr6_Ao

This one works, thanks!

I'll definitely be checking that out tonight. Here's a link to an interesting podcast about it

[Retronauts] 746: Resident Evil 2 vs. REsident Evil 2 #retronauts
https://podcastaddict.com/retronauts/episode/216250444 via @PodcastAddict