When Capcom brought in professional screenwriter Noboru Sugimura during development of the original Resident Evil 2, one of his key calls was to fully lean into the franchise’s famously ridiculous puzzles. His solution was simple: make Raccoon City’s police chief, Brian Irons, anything but “normal.”

PC Gamer revisits a 1998 interview to underline how turbulent Resident Evil 2’s development actually was. The game’s original version was rebooted roughly 70% of the way through production, and that abandoned build later became known as Resident Evil 1.5. Sugimura said that early direction felt too grounded, stripping away much of the ominous, stylized atmosphere that defined the first game, from the Spencer Mansion itself to its key items and strange little set pieces.

He also felt the police station in that early version was too contemporary, describing it as “too modern and strangely sterile,” and argued that it simply did not feel like Resident Evil. That push helped steer the team into a reset, including the shift toward a police station reimagined around an older art museum style, a setting that naturally supported the series’ gothic oddness.

The funniest and most revealing detail is how that change fed directly into the puzzle logic. Once the station became an old museum, someone on the team pointed out it would be odd for medals and similar key items to be “just lying around.” Sugimura’s answer, as quoted in the interview, was blunt: “Well, we’ll just have to make the police chief a weirdo then!” From there came Irons’ deviant characterization, the hidden room, and the idea that he had been taking bribes from Umbrella. Sugimura added that some developers initially complained it was unrealistic, but he pushed back with the idea that reality is about persuasion and belief, and “as long as everything was consistent, it would appear real.”

Resident Evil 2 director Hideki Kamiya also recalled that he opposed the idea at first, but the staff gradually embraced it and started inventing more outrageous details. He singled out the torches leading to Irons’ hidden room, saying the person who built the area told him: “The Chief uses those to light a fire when he has his rituals!” It is exactly that consistent, committed weirdness that helped cement Resident Evil’s puzzle identity for decades.

Source: PC Gamer