Before the release of Resident Evil 5 in 2009, the latest installment in the Resident Evil zombie video game franchise, Capcom started a viral marketing campaign to fuel the excitement and interest of fans. It was all centred around the fictional village in Africa where Resident Evil 5 takes place called Kijuju, which Chris Redfield, one of the main characters from first Resident Evil game, is having hallucinations about, brought on by traumatic stress of surviving the first outbreak of the zombie virus, the T-virus. Capcom made five viral videos called “Fear You Can’t Forget” and then contacted Resident Evil fans and fan sites and challenged them to find and the share videos online. The videos then directed fans to a Resident Evil website entitled “Kijuju”, which offered fans videos, screenshots, wallpapers and gameplay from the new RE5 to share with other fans. The official Resident Evil 5 website boasts that the Kijuju website was discovered by over half a million people, 190,000 of which were directed there by their friends, with an average of 24 shares per person. Capcom rewarded 100 of the top sharers by getting their name in the official RE5 instruction manual and some of the top sharers had their pictures transformed into a majini (zombie) and become part of the official Resident Evil 5 website. The viral campaign's mission is to get the RE5 community to come together to unlock exclusive RE5 assets including screenshots and videos which will ultimately flesh out some of the story. Resident Evil 5 was one of the first video games to have a viral marketing campaign which directly involved fans and fan communities and depended on their participation to create new content. As a result, fans have become more invested in the Resident Evil universe, as they get to co-produce what they also consume. Fan culture and fan communities work as a collaboratively embodied knowledge base and a network for making new stories, which changes how they interact with the Resident Evil narrative and produces new forms of meaning-making.
The Resident Evil 5 viral marketing campaign gave fan communities the opportunity to not only create new content and narratives to support the Resident Evil universe, but also to change the game by being able to insert those narratives into the actual game itself. I would argue that the ability of fans to actively influence the Resident Evil 5 video game is a form of remix, as they are remixing the content of the game to include their own interpretations, narratives and meanings of the text. However, some would argue that the viral marketing campaign only serves to exploit the social energies of existing fan communities as a source of free marketing using rewards such as being included on the website or manual to motivate fans to share the videos with as many people as possible. While this is certainly true, does this make the remix of Resident Evil 5 any less meaningful for fans? Is the process of remix still significant for fan communities if Capcom is profiting from it? Being a Resident Evil 5 gamer myself, I can tell you, with certainty, that it definitely is.
Check out the fifth and final video, "Back" in the "Fear You Can't Forget" viral marketing campaign for Resident Evil 5 below.
Great post, Kristine. Gaming Culture is something we haven't had much time to discuss in the context of remix culture and it is very important, not least because--as you point out--it is a highly commercial culture that is driven by fans/users. It challenges some of our assumptions about cultural ownership when it comes to remix. To add to your excellent questions; what happens when companies, like Capcom, create commercial cultural productions that are driven by fan expectations and demands? How does this intersect with notions of participatory culture?
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