Next year's Resident Evil Requiem marks the debut of the longrunning survival horror series on the Epic Games Store. It’s also the first step in the 30th anniversary celebration of Resident Evil, which originally debuted on the PlayStation on March 22, 1996.

Almost from the start, Resident Evil built a reputation for having one of the wildest storylines in video game history. Resident Evil Requiem is reportedly designed as an easy jumping-on point, as the beginning of a new story with a new protagonist.

Even so, it's helpful to know how we got to this point. If you’re planning to start your journey into the world of survival horror with Resident Evil Requiem next year, here’s a quick and dirty primer on the story so far, as told through its various files and background details.
 

Building better bastards

The world of Resident Evil is similar to our own, albeit with several different cities and countries. The first major point of divergence though is the Umbrella Corporation, a pharmaceutical giant that was founded in the United States in the 1960s. By 1998, Umbrella was virtually inescapable, with products like shampoo, painkillers, and instant noodles present in homes around the world.

While Umbrella’s drug business was lucrative and useful, it was never the company’s true focus. Behind the scenes, Umbrella's founders—Ozwell Spencer, Edward Ashford, and James Marcus—were old-money billionaires who created the company as a cover for their individual fields of research.

In the ‘60s, Spencer and Marcus found a strange virus in an isolated part of West Africa, which they came to call the Progenitor. Marcus quickly discovered that the Progenitor had the ability to rejuvenate dead cells, turning humans into half-living zombies, and he subsequently became obsessed with the virus’s potential.

Spencer, meanwhile, saw the Progenitor not only as a way to become even richer, but as a potential method to “improve” the human race through bio-engineering. His ultimate dream was to evolve the human race into a superior species, with Spencer himself as their god. 

Neither Marcus nor Spencer were particularly interested in the ethics behind the research, and making progress in Progenitor research involved a shockingly high mortality rate.

James Marcus’s research on the Progenitor eventually resulted in the creation of a new project code-named the T-Virus, which was more controllable than the Progenitor. The T-Virus is responsible for creating most of the zombies and many of the monsters that we’ve been fighting for the last 30 years of Resident Evil.

Marcus planned to use the T-Virus as his ticket to taking over Umbrella, but upon learning of this, Spencer had him quietly assassinated in 1978. Edward Ashford had died in an unrelated lab accident in 1968, which left Spencer as the CEO of Umbrella and its last surviving founder.
 

The original mansion incident

Over the next 20 years, Umbrella had multiple laboratories all over the world conducting research into the T-Virus, many of which were devoted specifically to weapons development. They planned to use the T-Virus’s regenerative qualities to create custom monsters, such as the reptilian Hunters, and sell them as tools for warfare.

One of the leading labs for Umbrella’s research was a secret facility in the Midwestern United States, located in the Arklay Mountains outside the town of Raccoon City. Umbrella had a corporate headquarters in Raccoon and poured a lot of money into the town over the years.

(As an aside: Raccoon City’s exact location in the United States has never been officially revealed by Capcom. Fans have noted, however, that as Raccoon is built on a river and is within a short distance of a mountain range and a national forest, one of the only places in the USA that it could be is southern Missouri.)

In May of 1998, everything changed when the T-Virus leaked in the Arklay lab, wiping out the entirety of the Umbrella research team. Worse, several of their creations escaped into the nearby forest, including several mutated dogs code-named the “Cerberus.”

After the dogs killed several tourists in the forest near Raccoon City, the local police put their Special Tactics And Rescue Service (STARS) units on the case. While the STARS suffered multiple casualties in the process, they discovered Umbrella’s ties to both the lab and the T-Virus.

Unfortunately for the STARS, they also discovered their commanding officer had been on Umbrella’s payroll, and that Umbrella had an iron grip on Raccoon City. All four surviving members of STARS quit the team in favor of pursuing their own investigations into Umbrella.
 

The Raccoon City Disaster

It was already too late for Raccoon City. The Arklay lab had been in the middle of a forest, and the T-Virus was capable of infecting almost any living being, including plant life. Anything could be an infection vector. Ever since the initial leak at Arklay, the T-Virus had steadily crept into Raccoon City, with several city employees reporting symptoms as early as August, 1998.

Meanwhile, Umbrella scientist William Birkin had been working on a project he viewed as his magnum opus: a new bioweapon called the G-Virus, based upon research at Arklay and perfected in Birkin’s own lab underneath the Raccoon Forest. Almost as soon as Birkin had finished work on the G-Virus, however, a strike team of Umbrella mercenaries attacked his lab to steal it.

The exact reason behind the strike varies between continuities. In the original version of Resident Evil 2, Birkin was a company man at Umbrella who planned to use the G-Virus to get a promotion, but was attacked due to company infighting. In the 2019 remake’s continuity, Umbrella’s strike was in response to Birkin’s plans to take his work to the United States military.

Birkin was accidentally shot during the attack, and in an act of revenge, injected himself with the G-Virus. That turned him into a homicidal, nearly indestructible monster. He tracked down and killed most of Umbrella’s mercenaries, but broke open several vials of the T-Virus inside Raccoon City’s sewer system in the process. That infected dozens of rats, which carried the T-Virus aboveground into the city.

Within hours of the attack on Birkin’s labs, hundreds of people in Raccoon City had succumbed to the T-Virus and become zombies. In addition, many animals within the city mutated into their own kinds of monsters, and several of Umbrella’s mutants escaped into the streets.

The outbreak unfolded over the course of roughly eight days, between September 22 and October 1. The local police, sabotaged from within by an insane commander, were out of the picture by the 28th, and another team of Umbrella mercenaries was torn apart almost on arrival within the city. By October 1 at dawn, the situation had degenerated to such an extent that the US government opted to wipe Raccoon City off the map with a missile strike.

(Note: This is the timeline from the original series, which was revised several times over the course of multiple games. In the 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake, the timeline is slightly shorter.)

At the time of the outbreak, Raccoon City had a population of roughly 100,000. While Capcom has never put out any official numbers, well under 50 people are known to have survived the incident.

One of those survivors was Alyssa Ashcroft, who’d been a reporter for a local newspaper in Raccoon City at the time of the outbreak.
 

Requiem

At time of writing, we don’t know much else about Alyssa, who was one of the playable characters in 2004’s Resident Evil Outbreak and its 2005 sequel. Her good ending in those games sees her escape the city and then write a book about the experience. Alyssa also subsequently made a cameo in 2017’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, where she’s identified as the author of a newspaper article found early in the game.

What we do know is that Alyssa eventually had a daughter named Grace, and we’ll be playing as Grace in next year’s Resident Evil Requiem, which is set 30 years after the Raccoon City disaster. Eight years before the game’s events, Alyssa was murdered under strange circumstances, and Grace is out to find her killer.

We’ll also be revisiting Raccoon City, which was reduced to a blast crater by the missile strikes at the end of Resident Evil 3. Early trailers for Resident Evil Requiem have shown the ruins of the city, including what’s left of several key locations like the Raccoon City Police Department.

That could mean Resident Evil Requiem will potentially follow up on a plot teaser from the end of Resident Evil Outbreak—long thought abandoned—about an unknown agency that had built a test facility in the ruins of Raccoon City. There’s also a distinct shot in some of the pre-release trailers of the Umbrella Corporation logo, which suggests Grace may end up in conflict with some of Umbrella’s legacy.

The Resident Evil series has spent much of the last 20 years building new stories in the wake of the Raccoon City disaster. The T-Virus has been cured in-universe, and many of the recent games are built around the presence of new and stranger bioweapons. For the 30th anniversary of the franchise, however, it looks like we might accompany Grace back to Resident Evil’s roots.

Resident Evil Requiem is coming to the Epic Games Store on February 27, 2026. If you pre-purchase the game via the Epic Games Store, you’ll also receive Grace’s Outfit and other items in Fortnite.