Part of the reason why Resident Evil is such an engaging franchise is due to the extensive lore surrounding the games. Playing each title reveals new information about the characters, setting, and most of all, origin of the creatures you face.
Most fans remember that the chaos that ensued in Racoon City (ground zero for zombie apocalypse) was directly caused by the mysterious T-Virus.
It’s not all that easy to keep up with the cryptic notes you find in the Spencer Mansion or the Umbrella labs – especially if you are trying to make sense of the how and why the T-Virus exists in the first place. It turns out that there are more than a few reasons that illustrate how this strange disease is mind-boggling.
10 The T-Virus Is Your Friend
The T-Virus exists in order to help the human race; you read that right. At least, that’s according to the folks who created it. Basically, a group of three scientists (Oswell E. Spencer, Edward Ashford, and James Marcus) found a flower in 1966 that had DNA altering properties. They thought they could exploit it to build a utopian society where humans are perfect.
The scientists needed lots of money to fund their objective, so they tinkered with this particular flower and fabricated the T-Virus – a bioweapon – to sell to the United States military. You can see where this is going. It all boils down to exploiting a weaponized disease to make money in order to toy with the human condition. The events that unfold in the games prove that these scientists had one of the worst ideas ever.
9 Let’s Make Sure No One Can Escape It
When these scientists were experimenting with the T-Virus, they realized that it wasn’t a completely effective bioweapon. Essentially, the virus infected people and turned them into zombies, but about 10% of a given population would be inherently immune to it. That’s bad for sales!
To guarantee a practically infallible mortality rate, the scientists used the T-Virus to bond a human egg and reptilian DNA that resulted in creating the fearsome Hunter (one of the many enemy types you encounter in the videogames). The Hunter’s purpose was to literally hunt down any people resistant to the T-Virus. It’s easy to see why these scientists weren’t able to control the situation and keep it from spreading – especially after engineering a being capable of turning against them.
8 The Virus Is Treatable
It would be terrible if the T-Virus had no cure, especially for Jill Valentine who gets infected with it Resident Evil 3. As a matter of fact, there are plenty of vaccines that get thrown around in the mix over the course of the entire saga.
Since the T-Virus is meant to be a bioweapon, an effective vaccine automatically renders it useless as its function as a deterrent. In a way, it would be like trying to sell Polio bullets to the army — it’s pointless because a known cure exists against it.
7 Means Of Infection Unsuitable For War
Just like most zombie viruses in other franchises, the T-Virus is transmitted through bites, fluids, and injection. It can also spread as an airborne pathogen in unspecified laboratory conditions. That would be the most effective way to manufacture the virus as a weapon: turning it into a gas that infects those exposed to it.
However, this must happen in closely monitored conditions that only a controlled environment can provide. So scratch warzones off the list. The T-Virus can spread through sewage and water supply systems, though, so it’s still dangerous to a city’s population. Again, that isn’t really going to work well when it comes to warzones.
6 Using Racoon City As Testing Ground
In Resident Evil 2, a vial of T-Virus gets spilled on the floor when a group of Umbrella agents almost kill Dr. William Birkin. This results in some rats getting infected, spreading the virus through Racoon City’s sewers, and eventually leads to the widespread zombie outbreak.
Umbrella saw this as an opportunity to test its manufactured virus against its own private soldiers, the city’s police, and the overall environment. Basically, they wanted to see if the virus would work in a war-like scenario. Wouldn’t it have been better to keep the testing of a bioweapon in a lab and cure a city mistakenly infected?
5 Can’t Be Contained
The events that unfold in the first three Resident Evil games show how dangerous the T-Virus can be if it gets out of control. Despite the various safety measures of a lab, this virus cannot be contained because it spreads through humans. This leads to Racoon City getting overrun with zombies and various other monsters.
To contain the situation, the city is razed to the ground in a bombardment issued by the U.S. military. This proves that, in order to contain the T-Virus, other weapons of mass destruction are required. Imagine if that was the label that comes on the box of a weapon the army wants to invest in.
4 It Creates Monsters To Fight
Another consequential downside to the virus’s effects is more obvious than not. It’s not an effective bioweapon because it doesn’t subtract combatants from a given enemy population; rather, it renders them harder to fight.
If a group is infected with the T-Virus, chances are that they will spread it to another group. All those infected become somewhat more resistant to conventional weapons. Everyone knows you shoot a zombie in the head to kill it, but not everyone is a sniper. Having to fight an army of zombies is a less than ideal scenario that probably ends up in a nuclear bombardment of some sort.
3 Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?
In essence, the T-Virus exists in order to fund twisted eugenics research known as Project Wesker that will create a “utopia” in which humans become an advanced race. Who asked for this? There is a stark distinction between finding a cure for a given disease and changing the overall nature of a species.
Imagine a group of scientists sitting down and actually talking about this. Merely considering such research requires some severely low morality. That’s without even getting into the business of creating zombies to get money.
2 Convenient Circumstances Galore
Resident Evil has a long history, perpetuated by plenty of games and spin-offs. In order to make each title more diverse, the T-Virus had to change at some point. Looking at Resident Evil 7’s lack of zombies shows how far the franchise has come from its origins. That’s not to say that the games are bad.
However, in each installment, it just seems like the T-Virus is somehow able to conveniently manipulate any life form and lead to the development of other viruses. Want giant spiders? Plants that shoot poison? Weird black moldy monsters? The T-Virus will somehow get you there thanks to its convenient characteristics. Keep in mind that it used to kill people only, without turning them into zombies, when it was first engineered.
1 It Doesn’t Resurrect Corpses
The zombies in Resident Evil are not dead people, technically. The T-Virus is actually incapable of resuscitating dead tissue and requires live cells in order to zombify someone. So, why do infected look like corpses then?
A side effect of the virus is necrosis or the death of any given tissue when blood stops flowing through it. Since the zombies in the games look chewed up or in the middle of decomposing, they can be easily mistaken for corpses who became zombies.
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