You can now play the original Resident Evil on PC in all its retro glory

By Carli Velocci Published June 26, 2024

Chris Redfield shooting a zombie in a hallway looking at a door behind him in the original Resident Evil game. — Capcom

Capcom has made it easy to experience older Resident Evil titles with the help of its many recent remakes, but you were mostly out of luck on modern platforms if you wanted to actually play the original versions of those titles. Well, the GOG PC gaming storefront announced Wednesday that you’ll soon be able to play the first three Resident Evil games in their (mostly) original forms.

Right now, however, only Resident Evil is available. For $10, you can play the iconic 1997 survival horror game with just a few quality-of-life improvements to make it run well on your Windows 10 or 11 PC. The GOG version makes some very small changes to the gameplay, including improving the timing of cutscenes and making it easier to exit the game, and it now has support for most modern controllers.

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Otherwise, this is the full version of Resident Evil, “completely uncut, with even more blood, graphic violence and gory scenes than the worldwide monster hit version on PlayStation,” the description reads. As is the case with most GOG titles, it’s also DRM-free.

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GOG didn’t announce specific release windows for Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 3 yet (although they’re due out this year), but you can wishlist them separately on the store or purchase a $25 trilogy bundle. Buying the bundle gets you just Resident Evil for now, with the other two games added to your library once they’re released.

Unless you found a used copy or wanted to go through the complicated emulation process, there was no way to play the first Resident Evil on PC until this GOG release. You could check out the 2002 remake or the 2015 HD remaster of that remake, but there’s no true replacement for the original’s blocky graphics and delightfully awkward dialogue. Plus, in each of these the developers made large changes to elements like the control scheme and the inventory. Besides the aforementioned tweaks, the GOG version changes almost nothing, so it’s the closest you can get to experiencing it like it’s 1997.

If you can’t wait for Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 on GOG, there are the two recent remakes, which are quite good, even if they’re based on Capcom’s way more modern Resident Evil sensibilities.

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Contributor, Games

Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…

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