Fear in Japan

An interesting point to note about the Resident Evil series is that during its development, Japan was in a state of fear. 1995 was not a good year for Japan, beginning with the Great Hanshin Earthquake which caused the equivalent of $102.5 billion in damages and claimed 6,434 lives with roughly 300,000 left homeless.

Later that same year a controversial religious group known as Aum Shinrkyo (now called Aleph) terrorized Japanese citizens with a string of Sarin Gas attacks on the Tokyo Metro. These attacks first began in June of 1994, but the attack in May of 1995 was of the largest scale. 12 people died, with 1,034 people injured (50 severely; 984 with temporary vision problems).  Before this, Japan had never really had a terroist attack, never mind one of bioterrorism.

I bring this up because a large number of the people working on this game were Japanese.  Capcom is a Japanese company, the producers were Tokuro Fujiwara; Masayoshi Kurokawa; and Masayuki Akahori, while the director was Shinji Mikami.  All  of these people would have been aware of the attacks during the development of the game.  Considering a huge section of the plot line is actually about bioterrorism, the original game title being Biohazard, these attacks must have played some sort of role conciously or not.

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