Capcom have done a brisk trade in Resident Evil remakes this past decade. They’ve gone back to formula with Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3, and Resident Evil 4, not just bumping up the resolution and revarnishing the cutscenes, but writing new variations on the old survival horror fables. There’s a Resident Evil: Code Veronica regurgitation due in 2027, and a Resident Evil 0 resurrection allegedly to follow in 2028.

The problems with this strategy are perhaps expressed by my previous sentence’s struggle to come up with extra synonyms for “remake”: sooner or later, Capcom are going to run out of original games they can credibly overhaul. Including the forthcoming or rumoured projects, they’ve only got Resident Evils 5 and 6 left now before they hit the “modern era” inaugurated by Resident Evil 7, the game that introduced the fancy RE Engine used by the remakes.

Will Capcom start… remaking their remakes? No, says executive producer Jun Takeuchi in an anniversary book interview spotted by RENews, via IGN. Or I don’t know, maybe they will, but in a way that meaningfully continues the narrative somehow. They’ve got dastardly plans for some kind of “crossover”, once the “two tracks” of the original and remade Resident Evils finally intersect.

“Someday, the remake series will catch up with the era of the numbered titles, and we are already thinking about what we will do when that happens,” Takeuchi explained. “In fact, we have been gradually preparing for that since around Resident Evil Village. The appearance of names such as Umbrella and Spencer, as well as the return of Raccoon City in [Resident Evil Requiem], are also in preparation for a ‘crossover’.

“At first, we included these elements with the sense that they were fan service,” he went on, “but users were far more delighted by them than we had imagined, and they even began analysing the thoughts that the development team had privately kept to itself. So, as a series, we decided to respond to users’ expectations and pushed this setup further in Village and Requiem.”

I still haven’t finished Requiem – here’s Callum’s review – so I’m not sure what exactly Takeuchi is alluding to, but all of this sounds like a recipe for some nu-FF7-esque metafictional recursive chaos. Jill Redfield is going to discover she’s her own grandmother. Wesker will turn out to be a Mandelbrot set. Lady Dimitrescu will return as a collapsed AI model, repeatedly devouring her own clones in an Umbrella Corporation edition of Westworld. They will get Hideo Kojima in to direct the cutscenes.

Trust me, it’s going to make the charmingly cock-eyed Greatest Hits that was Resident Evil 6 look like the epitome of the Aristotelian unities. It’s going to be an absolute shitshow and I cannot wait. Meanwhile, a single tear rolls down the face of the last Dino Crisis fan alive.

I think you could write a doctoral thesis on what “remake” has come to mean in the hands of today’s blockbuster game developers, straining to offset unprecedented production costs with a hearty injection of genetically engineered nostalgia. It creates space for some enjoyable/unsettling weirdness. The PS1 Resident Evils are about viral outbreaks and Big Pharma, and here we are spinning the yarn anew in the age of Covid. Anyway, let’s all do our bit to hasten the transformation of time into a flat circle. Here’s a poll.