The spirit of Resident Evil 4’s lost 2003 beta build lives on in the recently released remake – albeit in the tiniest way possible.
First, a warning that some extremely minor Resident Evil 4 Remake spoilers will follow. Still here? Good. (This is two decade-old stuff we’re talking about, after all.) As in the original, there’s a segment where you play as Ashley Graham, and in that section, you walk down a darkened hallway filled with mounted animal heads. At the end of the hall, a deer head falls to the ground, startling Ashley – and potentially you, too.
You might not have taken too much notice of that very tiny jump scare, but at least one hardcore Resident Evil fan with a long memory did. As KingKerog notes on Reddit (opens in new tab), this exact deer head scare happens in the E3 2003 build of Resident Evil 4. Often known as Resident Evil 3.5 (opens in new tab) – with this version specifically called ‘Hallucination’ – the early builds of RE4 were much more horror-focused, forcing Leon through hallucinatory hauntings in the midst of a dark castle.
Resident Evil 4 Remake goes much spookier than the original game in many respects, and you might point to the tone of those early betas as an influence. In fact, we’d been hearing exactly that even before the Remake was originally announced. Pre-announcement details leaked by Fanbyte (opens in new tab) indicated that Capcom was looking to “adjust the tone of the remake into something spookier, taking direct inspiration from discarded Resident Evil 4 demos.”
These aren’t even the only reference that the RE4 Remake makes to pre-release versions of the original. The jacket Ashley wears in the remake originally appeared in these beta builds, and heck, even the Chainsaw Demo focuses on the same chunk of content featured in the 2004 RE4 Preview Disc (opens in new tab).
Here’s the rough translation we put up of the demo map/controller screen files we found in the same build.And, oh, I love how Ashley’s unused jacket in RE4 finally resurfaced in the remake. (And how the proto-Sadler/Spencer model also resembles Spencer’s final look in RE5) pic.twitter.com/1HV9IyCms0March 29, 2023
We’re celebrating 27 years of Resident Evil, and it seems Capcom is keen to do the same.