Making Of Part Three: Hell's Kitchen!

At the time that Iheard Takeuchi-san was taking over the RE7 project, he hadn't said anythingabout supporting VR, but he became moreand more interested in it.

So I saw a chance.

At the time I was actuallyworking on the RE Engine.

I was in charge ofdesigning and developing the runtime at thecore of the engine.

Within that role,I kept thinking it would be reallyinteresting if we could team up Resident Evil with VR, so I kept watchingfor an opportunity.

I have to admit thatmy biggest miscalculation was that [Exec.

Producer]Takeuchi-san himself is not physicallyable to play VR much, so while he thoughtit could be fun, and he held the decision-makingpower on implementing VR in the final product,he wasn't able to make the decision basedon personal experience.

Since 2012, we'd beenresearching VR and wanted tomake all kinds of content.

We were passionateabout bringing VR to a big audience witha brand such as Resident Evil and a title like Resident Evil 7 But Takeuchi-san wasn't totallyon-board with it at first, so we thought weneeded to start experimenting.

We tried various approaches, and one of the results of thatwas the Kitchen tech demo, which we firstshowed off at E3 in 2015.

I felt that using anormal video to show off aPlayStation VR demo is not very interesting, no matter howrealistic you make it.

I thought theremust be another way to make it seem even scarier,like holding back on showing the screen displayduring the demo.

To get acrossthe horror experience people are havingon the PlayStation VR, I thought showingthe actual players reacting to the experience would be easier to get.

So we didn'tput out any video of Kitchen itself, just of the reactionsof people trying it out.

Kitchen isn'tjust normal horror: you are in a chair,hearing noises around you and creepy voices.

A woman with a knife comes out and attacks you.

It's obviously notsomething you'd experience in everyday life! We wanted playersto feel through the VR that they could bekilled at any moment, a sort of primal fear of your life being in danger.

We wanted to see if itwas really going to be scary, so using an actor -well, a Capcom staff member we recreated the scene, and they held theknife up in my face so I could seewhat distance was scariest.

It's obviously notsomething you see in real life.

We tried a few differentthings like using a blindfold, getting stabbed in the thigh,and as a result of that experimentation we completed the Kitchen demo.

We definitely gotwhat we were aiming for.

On the first dayof E3 that year, because we had onlyreleased the minimum of informationabout the demo, it didn't geta lot of buzz at first.

Sony were runninga lottery system for tickets to the VR demo area,and by the end of the show we heard fromthem that Kitchen was getting a lot of requests.

Another thing we learned from the successof the Kitchen demo was that whenit comes to horror, it's better notto show everything.

So for the campaignfor the main RE7 game as well, we chose a strategic direction of limiting theamount of information and assets we released.

Getting the engineto support VR and developingthe Kitchen demo took about two anda half months in total.

That's quite a tight schedule, so we were veryaware of the deadline as we workedtowards completion for showing at E3 in 2015, and it was great to seeit got an even better reception thanwe had expected.

As soon as peopleput the headset on they were screaming andsaying how scary it was some people wereshaking in fear.

Some people nearlyinjured themselves by practically fallingout of the chair when they were playing! There were so manyamazing reactions and those screams echoingthrough the show floor only drew morecrowds of people to come and seewhat was happening.

That was when wewere confident the horror of RE7 and VR were a great matchfor each other.

Our success at E3 was reallywhat made us finally decide that if wemade Resident Evil 7 fully VR compatible we could be the firstand scariest VR horror game.

VR compatibility wasn'tlocked down at that point, but Kitchen's successpaved the way for full VR in the game.

The 2015 Kitchen demo led us to E3 2016, when we announced Resi 7.

It was a lot of hard work leading up to the announcement.

What was most difficult was that we were instructed to make sure to keep the information secret, with absolutely no leaks.

To do this we limited theflow of information very carefully.

And in the end, even though some other titles titles at E3 had leaks, we were ableto announce Resident Evil 7 without anythingleaking beforehand, which made it a really impactful announcement.