Resident Evil - Text Adventure
Table of Contents
What is this? #
If you have played and completed Without Escape, you may have seen in the extras section an option called Background where I explain where the idea of making the game initially came from. There I explain how, when I was a kid who still had very little programming knowledge and didn’t know how to make games, I made a small text adventure based on web files. It was about escaping from your own house after being invaded by zombies. And although it didn’t contain any images, the mental image I had of the house in which it takes place is the one that ended up in Without Escape. In fact, even some of the things you can do in Without Escape come from this text adventure.
The zombie theme came from me being an obsessed fan of the Resident Evil series. And I couldn’t think of a better thing to do than to name this textual adventure… well… Resident Evil (That’s why in Without Escape, the screenshot of the text adventure has some blurred parts… Copyright and such). Another detail is that in the screenshot the game appears in English, but I actually only did it in Spanish (I knew very little English at that time). I simply edited it because I was suggested to make the screenshot more understandable internationally.
What happened to the game? #
And now you might be thinking… Oh, this is all well and good, but it sounds like one of those things that have been lost over the years… but no! I still have this game saved since 2002. And I think that, although it’s a childish nonsense that makes me a little embarrassed, maybe it would be nice to make it public for the first time… just in case someone is curious about it.
I’ve had this idea of making it public for a long time, but apart from the embarrassment, the game is made with Microsoft Word 2000. I didn’t even use Microsoft Frontpage, which was a common software to make websites back then that already had a bit of a bad reputation (also I didn’t even have internet back then and I did what I could). Word was worse, and made the web files… very Microsoft-like: totally lacking in web standards and bloated with a lot of Microsoft-specific stuff in the code, apart from a really crappy way of organizing the files and folders. In case you don’t know, back then it was the wild west in terms of web standards, and each company did whatever they wanted. So my humble text adventure doesn’t work too well in today’s browsers: sounds don’t work and things get messed up depending on the size of the window (it’s designed for a miserable 800x600 resolution).
And here I am, 21 years later, and I’ve finally decided to fix it and make it public. And well, I’ve basically redone it from scratch.
What’s new #
For this new version my intention was to make the game comfortably playable in today’s browsers, but keeping completely the essence of the original (maintaining also the crappy and embarrassing factor). I’ve simply corrected some typos and fixed some text that wasn’t very understandable. I have also done a quick English translation so that more people can understand it. And one of the three endings it has is now a little easier to obtain. In the original it was practically impossible, it was more for trolling than anything else.
From a technical point of view, the game no longer consists of each room being an HTML file, but is now all done in JavaScript. This has allowed me to make some things more dynamic, like being able to change the language at any time, turn the audio on or off, or make the background colors rescale dynamically according to the size of the window (the original used quite compressed fixed-size JPGs).
How to play it #
Well, that’s the easiest part… just click on the following link. So I hope you are not too hard on me for this and you find it at least interesting. Luckily you will find all the endings… the most difficult one has a little “surprise”…