Resident Evil 7 Eerily Predicted The Future
Even Resident Evil 7 knew that 2020 would be horrifying. A Resident Evil fan account discovered this week that Capcom's 2017 survival horror game contains a book titled 2020. Although it likely wasn't meant at the time to be a significant Easter egg, Capcom's choice to showcase that particular year now has some eerie undertones given everything that happened in 2020.
A Twitter account titled No Context Resident Evil shared a screenshot from Resident Evil 7 in which a collection of various books lined a shelf. Among the titles were Murder in Cleveland, Beautiful Home, Heartless Betrayal, Fighting Street, and 2020. With no other information available on the book's spine, it's hard to say why the asset designer chose to include a book about the year 2020 in the collection, or if 2020 really stood for a year at all. As Game Rant suggested, it may have been intended to create general uneasiness about the near future.
It's also worth noting that the book has appeared more than once in the Resident Evil franchise. Another Twitter user shared in the replies a screenshot from 2019's Resident Evil 2 Remake, where another bookshelf with the same 2020 book can be seen. It seems the asset has remained in Capcom's library for quite some time.
The Resident Evil 7 discovery led many other fans in the replies to crack jokes about the book. Some said it's too small to even come close to covering all the wild events that happened in 2020, while others implied that whoever opened the book was responsible for 2020's chaos. One user joked that the franchise's Umbrella Corporation was actually responsible for COVID-19. Interestingly, user Rabbit Sensei Gaming reminded everyone that 2012's Resident Evil 6 was all about fighting off the new C-virus, a widespread disease that had major outbreaks in China and America. "...It's almost as if the devs saw the future," the person wrote.
Resident Evil fans are currently awaiting the release of Resident Evil 8: Village, which is slated to be available on next-gen consoles at some point this year. The latest sneak peek at the franchise's newest installment came during Naomi Osaka's PS5 demo, where fans caught a brief glimpse of Resident Evil 8's setting. The game has been the subject of rumors for about a year, though little else has been confirmed beyond what fans saw in the Resident Evil 8 demo.