'Resident Evil' Series Passes 90 Million Units Sold

Capcom has announced that the Resident Evil series has surpassed 90 million units sold across all of its releases.

As of January 28 of this year, the series was sitting at 88 million units, which means it has shipped another two million in the couple weeks since. And presumably most of these sales came from Resident Evil 2, which released last month to critical-acclaim and healthy initial sales.

At 90 million, Resident Evil is comfortably Capcom's best-selling franchise. And this is not very surprising when you consider it is lauded as the best horror series ever in video games, and has seen 24 different releases small and big since it debuted back in 1996.

For those that don't know: Resident Evil can trace its roots all the way back to 1993, when development began under the wing of Tokuro Fujiwara and Shinji Mikami, who conceived it as a remake of 1989 Capcom horror game, Sweet Home. However, in 1994 Capcom learned that a DOS game had recently been registered under that name in the United States, which led to the series' being called Resident Evil. A much more marketable name, if you ask me.

Two years later, Resident Evil made its debut on PlayStation in 1996, where it was pitched as a "survival horror" game, a term coined for the new genre it was creating. And the rest is history. To date, the series remains extremely popular, though perhaps not as popular as it has been the past. It appears the series peaked with Resident Evil 4-6, and has since dwindled a little bit.

Most recently the series has produced a remake of Resident Evil 2, which not only transformed the 1998 horror classic with a graphical overhaul, but modernized it in other ways for an audience in 2019. And it seems to have gone over well. Depending on the platform it has a 91, 92 or 89 on Metacritic.

Of course, passing 90 million units means we could very well see it past 100 million by the time the next installment releases, an extremely impressive milestone that not many series can hang their hat on.

23 years old, Resident Evil is a staple of the gaming industry, and one that almost every gamer has experienced at some point. Let us know in the comments below what your favorite memory of the series is. And of course: what do you think is the best entry to date?

Thanks, Reset Era.