This post is about 16 years in the making!

FINALLY. Although I'm pretty sure this menu was lifted from the release version.

Back in 1996, I was obsessed with Resident Evil. I got the game the week it came out and played it pretty much non-stop until the sequel finally dropped about two years later. In between sessions of whippin zombies asses, I learned how to make websites and built a fan page for Resident Evil 2. Although it wasn't the Resident Evil 2 we all know and love, it was what the world has deemed "Resident Evil 1.5." I never thought I'd be able to give it a whirl, until today.

Resident Evil 1.5 is the preliminary work Capcom did on Resident Evil 2, the planned follow-up to the smash hit game. The very first screenshots ever seen of Resident Evil 2 are from this version of the game, which was eventually scrapped to pursue the direction of the game that was released. Was this a bad thing? Absolutely not, Resident Evil 2 is probably the best game in the entire franchise and I don't think anything going on in this alpha build was going to change that.

I am pretty sure this image was on my website when I was 14. I actually think I had every picture on the web for RE2 hosted on my site at the time.

I've been tracking this thing for a very, very, very, very long time. It's been on the radar for years, but no one ever let the thing slip out into the public. A few people had copies of this primitive build, and a group of people got together to try to resurrect it into a playable form. The word on the street is someone got greedy, so they decided to just let the thing loose on the public. The closest I ever got was a bum ISO of the game that didn't boot. This one does, and I just played it.

To say I played it would be sort of a stretch, because there really isn't much to do beyond explore. You can select a character and walk around the RPD building. Some of the doors don't work, and some of the doors you go in don't necessarily take you back to where you were. Luckily there is a debug menu which allows you to teleport around the game, so you can explore every room.

The first most noticeable change between this version and release is the other character in the game: Elza. She was a young motorcycle racer, who was stranded in town. This character was eventually reworked and turned into Claire Redfield, overall a good choice for the series in my opinion. I believe they wanted to tie the two games together, and Claire was that link to Chris.

Elza, pretty much Claire version 1.

Other than Elza, the game is pretty much the exact same. Some of the environments are reused in the final game, but with a few tweaks. Leon's character model looks almost the same, and I'm pretty sure his animations were already done at this point. I could only find one box of bullets in the game, so I only shot a few zombies too. Felt about the same.

It's pretty fair to say that they were pretty much on the right path with this build, but decided to go in a different direction in terms of environments. This build looks quite a bit less detailed than the final release, which is A-OK with me. I never expected it to work, so getting to actually walk around and see the game I posted pictures and wrote fan pages for 16 years ago.

If you are interested in checking it out, you can find the ISO file on NeoGAF and run it on ePSXe. Getting ePSXe to run takes a minute to get everything set up, but once it fires up you just load the ISO and get cracking. Be warned you will encounter some wacky shit and it will crash on you. It's a fairly stable build, but it's prone to crashing. Some of the rooms are also fairly jacked up, so don't expect it to be anywhere near finished. It's a very cool peek into the past of this epic franchise.

ALSO, beware when you walk into Brian Iron's office, he does some freaky shit and it will crash your game. It's really creepy.

NeoGAF - ISO image:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=513896

ePSXe - emulator:
http://www.epsxe.com/download.php

Pete's OpenGL plugins:
http://www.pbernert.com/html/gpu.htm

PSX Bios file here:
http://www.emuparadise.me/biosfiles/bios.html