Otuz Yıl Biyolojik Silahlar ve Yıkılmış Şehirler: Şimdiye Kadarki Resident Evil Hikayesi

The Resident Evil series has been running since 1996, and by the time Resident Evil Requiem arrives as the ninth mainline installment, its story has accumulated three decades of pharmaceutical conspiracies, recurring characters, competing evil organizations, and enough viral strains to fill a laboratory catalogue. For anyone approaching Requiem without prior history in the series, the connective tissue between games can feel impenetrable. This is the compressed version — the events, factions, and figures that matter most when stepping into Requiem's version of a long-unfinished story.

The Umbrella Corporation And The Spencer Mansion

Everything in Resident Evil lore originates with a single company. The Umbrella Corporation, co-founded by Oswell E. Spencer and James Marcus, built its public identity as a pharmaceutical firm while developing biological weapons in secret. The core of their research was the T-Virus, engineered by combining leech DNA with a naturally occurring pathogen called the Progenitor Virus, discovered in the 1960s. The T-Virus converts infected hosts into zombies. That is its primary function and the engine that drives most of what follows across the entire series.

The first game begins in July 1998 in the American Midwest, outside a fictional city called Raccoon City. A wave of cannibalistic attacks in the surrounding mountains prompts the deployment of STARS, the Special Tactics and Rescue Service. Bravo Team is sent first, crashes, and loses contact. Alpha Team follows: Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Albert Wesker, and Barry Burton. They locate the Spencer Mansion, an Umbrella research facility built into the estate of the company's co-founder. The underground lab beneath it had been running T-Virus experiments, and containment failed. Zombies, infected animals, and experimental creatures now occupy the building. Wesker, a STARS officer embedded as an Umbrella mole, attempts to use a creature called Tyrant against the team. STARS kills it with a rocket launcher. The mansion self-destructs. Wesker is presumed dead in the explosion. He is not.

Before Alpha Team arrived, a separate thread was already running. In Resident Evil 0, field medic Rebecca Chambers discovered an Umbrella-owned train in the mountains, filled with zombies and leeches. She partnered with discharged Marine Billy Coen to survive it and uncover the connection to Umbrella's internal politics between Spencer and Marcus. Rebecca eventually made it to the Spencer Mansion and survived. The train, the lab, the mansion — all Umbrella infrastructure. All compromised.

Raccoon City Falls

Two months after the Spencer Mansion incident, the T-Virus reached Raccoon City through the water supply. The city became the site of the series' defining catastrophe. Two separate stories unfold simultaneously over a period of days in September 1998.

Leon S. Kennedy arrived in Raccoon City on what was supposed to be his first day as a police officer. He encountered Claire Redfield, who was looking for her brother Chris. They reached the police station, already overrun. An Umbrella scientist named William Birkin had developed a second viral strain, the G-Virus. Birkin injected himself with it after being shot by Umbrella agents attempting to steal his research, and mutated into a recurring monster the pair had to fight repeatedly through the sewers and underground facilities beneath the city. A variant of Tyrant — the trenchcoat-wearing Mr. X — stalked them through the police station. Ada Wong, presenting herself as an FBI agent but working as a mercenary, arrived to steal the G-Virus sample for an undisclosed buyer. Birkin's daughter Sherry was infected with the G-Virus at an orphanage and cured with a vaccine before Claire extracted her from the city. Leon and Claire escaped on a train. Ada secured the G-Virus sample and vanished.

Simultaneously, Jill Valentine was attempting to leave Raccoon City when she was targeted by Nemesis, an Umbrella bioweapon designed specifically to eliminate STARS members before they could expose the company. A mercenary named Carlos Oliveira helped her escape. Nemesis infected Jill with the T-Virus during the pursuit. Carlos obtained a vaccine and administered it the following day. By then, the United States government had already decided to destroy the city entirely. A missile strike reduced Raccoon City to a crater. Jill escaped hours before impact. Leon and Claire had gotten out days earlier. The city and most of its population were gone.

One detail from Resident Evil Outbreak — a side game set during the same outbreak — places a reporter named Alyssa Ashcroft among the survivors. Alyssa is Grace Ashcroft's mother. Grace is Requiem's protagonist.

The Aftermath And Wesker's Return

With Umbrella's central facility destroyed and its crimes made public, the company began to collapse. But the people connected to it did not disappear. Three months after the bombing, Claire Redfield was captured by Umbrella while searching for Chris in Code: Veronica, imprisoned at a facility in the Southern Ocean, and then pursued through a zombie-overrun Umbrella base in Antarctica. Chris arrived to rescue her and encountered Wesker — alive, augmented, and now working independently. Wesker stole a third viral strain, the T-Veronica Virus, another Progenitor Virus variant with similar zombie-producing properties, and escaped.

Leon reappeared in 2004 in Resident Evil 4, operating as a government agent. His mission took him to a rural village in Spain to recover Ashley Graham, the US President's daughter, who had been kidnapped by a cult leader named Osmund Saddler. The cult's zombie-like members were infected not with any T-Virus variant but with Las Plagas, a parasite that produces similar behavioral effects — with the addition of large tentacles erupting from decapitated hosts. Ada Wong surfaced again to steal a Las Plagas sample for Wesker. Leon cured Ashley, destroyed Saddler, and escaped the island as it detonated. Ada delivered the sample.

Five years after that, Chris returned in Resident Evil 5, now a member of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA), a counter-bioterrorism organization. A mission in Africa led him to another Las Plagas outbreak and, eventually, to Wesker, who had been working for a rival pharmaceutical company called Tricell using the T-Veronica Virus he had stolen. Wesker's plan involved a Progenitor Virus variant called Uroboros, intended for global deployment. Jill Valentine, believed dead after a confrontation with Wesker years earlier, turned out to be alive and under his mind control. Chris rescued her. He and his partner Sheva Alomar killed Wesker. Umbrella's original architect of global bioterrorism was finally eliminated.

Resident Evil 6 expanded the scale further into a multi-front bioterrorist war set in a fictional Eastern European republic. A new strain called the C-Virus produced another zombie outbreak. A new organization, Neo-Umbrella, appeared to be run by Ada Wong — but the figure leading it was an impersonator. Leon, Chris, Jake Muller (Wesker's son), and Sherry Birkin (the same Sherry from Raccoon City, now a government agent) all operated across different theaters of the same conflict. The good guys contained it. Chris remained with the BSAA.

The Ethan Winters Chapter

Resident Evil 7 Biohazard arrived as a structural departure. No STARS, no BSAA, no government agents. A civilian named Ethan Winters followed a message from his missing girlfriend Mia to a plantation in Louisiana and was taken captive by the Baker family, a household of zombie-like creatures controlled by a bioweapon called Eveline. Eveline was a mold-based organism — not a T-Virus product — created by a shadowy corporation called The Connections, for whom Mia secretly worked as a transporter. Ethan killed Eveline, rescued Mia, and was extracted by Chris Redfield arriving with a team bearing a new Umbrella logo. The organization was Blue Umbrella, a reformed entity built from the remnants of the original company, now operating as a counter-bioterrorism unit.

Resident Evil Village picked up three years later. Chris and a BSAA team entered Ethan's home, shot Mia, and took Ethan and his infant daughter Rosemary. The car transporting them crashed in Eastern Europe. Ethan woke in a village overrun by werewolf-like creatures controlled by a cult leader named Mother Miranda, who had divided Rosemary's body into four pieces distributed among her lieutenants — including the widely recognized tall vampire Lady Dimitrescu. Miranda had survived for decades thanks to a black mold organism called Megamycete, which also turned out to be the source of the mold from Resident Evil 7. More significantly, Miranda was Spencer's mentor. Everything Spencer learned about biological weapons — the foundation of the T-Virus, Umbrella's entire research program — came from Miranda's work. The Connections, the organization that built Eveline, also traced back through her network.

Ethan recovered Rosemary's pieces, reassembled her, and sacrificed himself to destroy Miranda. Chris took Rosemary to safety. He also discovered that someone had converted his BSAA soldiers into bioweapons, leaving a new thread unresolved. Ethan's death was complicated by the fact that he had been infected with the black mold during the events of Resident Evil 7 and had developed regenerative properties as a result — a detail that Village's epilogue leaves open.

Into Requiem

Resident Evil Requiem begins decades after September 1998. Leon S. Kennedy is investigating what has been happening to the survivors of Raccoon City. Grace Ashcroft, daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft — one of those survivors — is abducted by a figure named Victor Gideon and imprisoned in the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center. The two storylines converge in what the game positions as both a new chapter and a closing of the original Raccoon City arc.

The Umbrella Corporation's founders, their motivations, and the long chain of events set off by a single failed containment in 1998 all feed directly into what Requiem is built on. Grace's connection to a Raccoon City survivor is not incidental. The ruins of the city itself are revisited. Three decades of accumulated Resident Evil lore arrive at this installment with specific weight.

As I wrote in the post “ RE Requiem got a review ”, I think newcomers who hesitate at Requiem because there are nine mainline entries behind it are approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Start here. The first impression of a franchise is what determines whether you go back for more, and Requiem is designed to function as both an endpoint and an entry point. Fall for this one first, then return to the beginning with the motivation already in place. Everything covered in this piece will mean more after the fact than it would as prerequisite homework.

The virus names differ — T-Virus, G-Virus, T-Veronica, C-Virus, Las Plagas, Uroboros, Megamycete — but they all produce functionally similar outcomes. The organizations change names and logos — Umbrella, Tricell, Neo-Umbrella, Blue Umbrella, The Connections — but the structure of evil pharmaceutical research persists across all of them. The heroes rotate, but Leon, Chris, Jill, Claire, and Ada have all intersected repeatedly across thirty years of this story. Requiem inherits all of it.