Capcom admits that it was difficult to remaster Resident Evil in HD

Remastered versions of old games are becoming more and more popular these days, although there are some who argue that all companies are doing is releasing the game a second time just so they can make more money off of it. Be that as it may, there is a lot of work that goes into making a game run in HD so perhaps some of the companies who go through the trouble deserve the money. The original Resident Evil is one of the games that is receiving the Remastered treatment in preparation for its 2015 (re-)release. Developer Capcom says that making Resident Evil look impressive is hard work, which is not surprising considering that the graphics quality bar was raised significantly since the game first came out back in 1996.

“The biggest challenge for us in raising the resolution was the backgrounds themselves and the effects in them. Originally, these had been created from still images, so there was a lot of work done by hand to the assets we had in order to raise the quality bar,” Resident Evil Remastered Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi told Destructoid. “If the original data had been large enough, this would have been a relatively easy process, but the assets we’re working with were created for a game over a decade ago, so we didn’t have a lot of high-resolution source material to work from. We had to find a way to take what we had on hand and work hard to make resolution and other adjustments bit by bit.”

The Producer also says that all the effects had to be redone from scratch and the original Resident Evil designer was there to supervise the whole process. Seeing as how the backgrounds were initially in 2D, making them 3D and high definition was definitely not an easy feat. “As far as effects are concerned, these were all redone from scratch,” said Hirabayashi. “Even then, we had the original designer on hand to personally look over all of these and ensure that they were in line with his vision. We used multiple techniques depending on the needs of a particular scene. Our goal was to preserve the feeling and atmosphere of a given scene while raising the resolution. Each scene, each cut, was judged on its own merits as we determined the best way to handle them one at a time. That was a tough process. There is definitely a sort of flavor or sensibility in backgrounds created as 2D pieces that can be very hard to replicate in polygons.”

Resident Evil Remastered will be released in early 2015 for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and the PC.