Andrew accepts this one momentary error in judgement is something he'll have to live with forever, but from his perspective, it was symptomatic of the self-destructive lifestyle he was leading at the time. He jokes even today, 22 years later, he's still being asked about it. "I lent mine to a friend and, well, you know the rest." This decision effectively ended his career as a games journalist, turning him into "the Resident Evil 2 guy". "All of us were allowed to borrow games" Cockburn explains. The original GamFan was in publication from September 1992 to December 2000.Īt the time, it was quite common for staff writers to take demo discs home. Yet there's a very clear sense of pain and frustration as he relates the story of how the review copy made its way into the wild. Sitting in front of the family computer at his home in southern California, Andrew's calm and friendly demeanour immediately puts me at ease.
"And I closed a lot of doors." It wasn't until 2009 - 12 years after Resident Evil 2 hit the black market - that Cockburn got back into the video game industry, taking a position at Naughty Dog and working on the Uncharted series as well as The Last of Us. "I hurt a lot of people," he tells Eurogamer. That one mistake effectively ruined his life, costing him his job and causing him to become entangled in a lawsuit.
Over 20 years later, Andrew Cockburn is a Christian minister in training, a vocation partially inspired by his experience in December '97. It wasn't hard for Capcom to figure out where the leak had come from. A few days after GameFan's exclusive preview hit store shelves, the Hong Kong black market was awash with copies of the as yet unreleased Resident Evil 2. Secondly, one of GameFan's staff writers, Andrew Cockburn, took a copy home with him for some extra-curricular gaming. First of all, it enabled the masters of screenshots to show off a totally different game to the one attentive fans might have seen a year earlier, nudging those first few dedicated Resident Evil fanatics into a lengthy search for Resident Evil 1.5. This was important for a number of reasons. In December 1997, the office of north American '90s magazine GameFan, which was once known for filling its pages with high quality screenshots, received an advance copy of the soon to be released Resident Evil 2. At this point, Resident Evil 1.5 ceased to be anything more than a handful of discs, each in different stages of completion, spread all over the world. On 17th February that same year, Capcom unofficially cancelled the project and the team started over, eventually producing the version of Resident Evil 2 that would scare the pogs out of our pockets in 1998. Resident Evil was something of a departure from the norm for Capcom, who were best known at the time for fighting/platforming titles like Street Fighter and Mega Man.īut by early 1997, Mikami began to feel that, despite excellent progress being made, his sequel simply wasn't good enough. Work progressed well and the aforementioned 40 per cent build of the game was sent to Capcom of America. Thus, he concocted the story of an outbreak set in and around a police station. Shinji Mikami, lead planner on that legendary title, was rewarded with a promotion to producer and immediately set to work crafting a game that, in his own words, would tap into that classic notion of horror of the ordinary, made strange.
The first game had been a huge hit for Capcom and the company understandably wanted a sequel. To tell the tale of the search for Resident Evil 1.5, we need to go back to mid-1996. However, for most of its shrouded existence, those who knew of it would call it Resident Evil 1.5.
This collection of code and assets would come to be referred to by many names over the years, among them "the 40 per cent build" and "the raw build". It was only 40 per cent complete by this point, but had more than enough playability for it to be used as a demonstration tool. The data on that disc was an early build of a sequel to the hugely popular Resident Evil. Yet this mundane act of basic admin would be the catalyst that sparked a 15-year hunt, spanning multiple continents and involving death, betrayal and large sums of money. It was the '90s after all and CD-ROMs, with the capacity to hold hundreds of megabytes, were cutting edge technology. This kind of activity wasn't uncommon for the time. Over 5000 miles away in Osaka, Japan a Capcom employee burns some data to a disc. Robson & Jerome are top of the UK's pop charts, Die Hard Trilogy is about to be released on the PlayStation and The English Patient premieres in Los Angeles to widespread critical acclaim.