by 
Last year, while covering a Resident Evil-related story, I received a comment on the site that opened my eyes to a strange mystery in the Resident Evil fanbase I had never really thought about much before: the origin of "Mr. X", the official nickname for the T-00, from Resident Evil 2.
In the comment, the individual, whom I won't name here, stated how it was a shame I referred to Resident Evil 2's Tyrant in one of our articles exclusively as Mr. X, describing this moniker as a "fake name given by a US strategy guide because the author couldn't be bothered to look up the character's actual name." They noted, because of this, it "has been falsely parroted as their official name ever since," and after looking online, I found many people who believed a variation of this story — that it was never an official name but was simply adopted from another source — arguing that the name never appeared in the dialogue for the original game.
What's interesting about it is that, to an extent, these people do seem to be correct: Mr. X is a name that doesn't appear anywhere in the original version of Resident Evil 2. In fact, the only clue we have of its identity in that game seems to be the tank it emerges from, labelled T-00, with the nickname Mr. X instead being reserved exclusively for its appearance in licensed material.
With all this in mind, then, it kind of begs the question, where exactly did this name originate from, then? And was it ever even official to begin with? Keen to find answers, I decided to investigate.
To start off, I did some preliminary googling to see if I could find any popular theories and came across an online theory that attributes the name to an error on Capcom USA's part.
This theory suggests the US branch of the company mistakenly handed licensees early concept art, including an illustration of the T-00 labelled "Tyrant X," which could then have been misinterpreted by someone outside the company, who shortened it to "Mr X," leading to the name's proliferation elsewhere. In GameFan's Resident Evil 2 Survival Guide, for instance, it refers to the character as Mr. X pretty much throughout, whereas the Toy Biz figure from 1999 also uses the name, describing the character as follows in the marketing blurb on the back of the packaging:
Mr. X is Umbrella's ultimate assassin. Cold, calculating and unrelenting, this unstoppable creature is the result of farther bio-genetic testing of the T-Virus that was used to create the Tyrant. With the T-Virus coursing through his veins, Mr. X possesses incredible power and endurance and is impervious to conventional weapons. Mr. X can transform into Tyrant mode to overcome any opponent or obstacle. When Umbrella's team of assassins failed to report in, Mr. X was dropped from a genetic experiment storage tank into the heart of Raccoon City, programmed to locate and retrieve the new, deadlier G-Virus... and eliminate any Raccoon City survivors.
As for SD Perry's Resident Evil 2 novelisation, City of the Dead, it also opts to take advantage of this nickname, rather than its official designation, T-00, crediting its name to one of the protagonists, Claire Redfield, in the following excerpt:
"Without taking her shocked gaze from the reeling giant, Claire grabbed another clip from her vest and fumbled through reloading, her brain crazily trying to name this walking abortion.
Terminator, Frankenstein’s monster, Dr. Evil, Mr. X—
Whatever it was supposed to be, the seven-plus semi-jacketed rounds to the chest had finally taken effect."
To find out whether this theory was true, I reached out to Capcom USA's licensing agent at the time, Marc Mostman, who immediately told me this wasn't the case. Instead, he told me that his "understanding" of the character (as Capcom’s licensing agent) was that "he was called Mr. X when in 'human' form, with the trenchcoat, and then Tyrant once he took off the coat and transformed." To prove his point, he provided me with some previously unseen artwork of Toy Biz's "Mr. X" figure, drawn by Toy Biz's artists, which were reportedly sent back and forth between Capcom Japan and the US for approval. This appeared to confirm that Capcom Japan was at the very least on board with the name, but it didn't quite prove who had actually come up with it in the first place.
As a result, when I spoke to the former-Capcom Japan employee Tom Shiraiwa, who was credited with the Japanese-to-English translation of Resident Evil 2 earlier this year, I couldn't resist asking him whether he could remember anything about the name, to see if we could put this mystery to bed once and for all. Given that it's been almost decades since he was at Capcom, Shiraiwa warned me that his memory might not be the best, but he seemed to debunk the idea that the name was an outside invention, claiming to have memories of it either appearing in the early draft of the game's text or the style guide Capcom Japan created for overseas licensing.
"I don't remember very well," Shiraiwa told us. "But I think Mr. X was in the very early version of the in-game text. We already started translating it based on the very early draft of the text, and I think Mr. X was left there, maybe in the in-game text or maybe in the style guide. I think that's how that happened." He added, "I guess at that time the dev team was still thinking about the final name of the character. And they put Mr. X as a placeholder name or something."
For some, this might have been fairly definitive, but given Shiraiwa himself had reason to doubt his own memory, I was curious if I could dig a little deeper, so I went looking to see if I could find early development information on Resident Evil 2, and inevitably came across Project Umbrella, an incredible online resource run by Resident Evil fans. This is a website that contains a wealth of information on a bunch of obscure Resident Evil lore and development materials, including a fan-translated version of the Resident Evil 2/Biohazard 2 scriptbook, written by the television and video game writer Noboru Sugimura and Resident Evil 2 director Hideki Kamiya, which was precisely the kind of thing I was after.
This revealed that, though the name "Mr. X" was nowhere to be found, the name Nazo no Otoko X (謎の男Ｘ, literally "Mysterious Man X") does appear, suggesting this could have been what Shiraiwa was referring to, and the original source of the name, before it either evolved or was localised. What's particularly notable about the way in which this name is used in the script is that it doesn't appear in any dialogue, but is primarily featured in the script as a way to conceal the character's true identity, serving as an alias in "human" form until the character is later revealed to be Tyrant:
"At that moment, the surface of the giant vat starts bubbling up, and a huge splash shoots up, and a strange monster jumps out, and lands on the overpass. Sharp claws. Mysterious Man X was actually a tyrant."
This could provide a reason why the name never appears in the actual game, as its name was used to generate intrigue and mystery around the character, something that could just as easily be achieved in the final game simply by omitting the name entirely. Speaking to the PlayStation blog back in 2019 to coincide with the release of the Resident Evil 2 Remake, that game's director, the veteran Capcom employee Yasuhiro Anpo, offered a quote that seemed to support this:
"His official name is “Tyrant,” and is one of Umbrella’s mass-production models. The reason he was also referred to as “Mr. X” was because there weren’t many details disclosed about him, even in the original title. This was done on purpose, since we felt that it would be far more terrifying to be chased around by a large man with no rhyme or reason or explanation why. Providing the player with too much information would only lessen the mystery and fear of the unknown, so we kept things shrouded in darkness."
At this point, it's safe to say I feel pretty confident that the name Mr. X wasn't "a fake name given by a US strategy guide because the author couldn't be bothered to look up the character's actual name" or a mistake on behalf of Capcom USA, but that it did actually originate from the Resident Evil development team.
However, there are a few annoying loose threads left that I still have yet to unpick — chief among them being how or why the name Mr. X was chosen.
Given that Hideki Kamiya has previously confirmed that Leon's first name originated from Jean Reno's milk-drinking assassin in the 1994 Luc Besson film, Léon: The Professional, the obvious go-to would be Oliver Stone's 1991 political thriller JFK, which featured a character by the name of Mr. X, played by Donald Sutherland; this would also perhaps explain Leon S. Kennedy's surname. But I found no official sources confirming this, and my attempts to obtain official confirmation from the original developers have so far been unsuccessful. I'm hoping, though, that publishing this article may help bring this final piece of information to light.