GOG has revealed that Capcom was initially reluctant to release the original Resident Evil 1-3 on PC, as it believed fans already had access to the "superior" versions of the three games via their remakes.
The revelation was brought to light during a recent interview, published yesterday, with the B2B games website The Game Business, in which Marcin Paczynski, GOG's senior business manager, went over the initial conversations he had with Capcom that led to the reissuing of the three games on PC last year.
As Paczynski noted in this interview, when he first approached Capcom about the possibility of rereleasing the PC versions of the original three Resident Evil games, the company's attitude towards the idea seemed to be that there was no value in releasing these titles again.
This was because, as he recalls, Capcom felt players could already buy and experience the "superior" HD remaster of Resident Evil, as well as Resident Evil 2 Remake, and Resident Evil 3 Remake.
"Capcom were like, ‘We have all of those remakes. It’s already the superior experience to those games,'" said Paczynski.
"They didn’t really see the value in bringing back the vanilla versions. It took a lot of convincing that there is an audience that has a lot of memories about those games, and would love to experience exactly the same game again. Thankfully, we were able to convince them."
This is a viewpoint that is concerning, to say the least, and has since drawn quite a bit of criticism on social media following the interview going live, with many online expressing concerns that a developer/publisher would potentially limit access to its original titles based on this belief, as opposed to taking a more preservation-minded approach.
Nevertheless, as Paczynski pointed out, GOG did eventually manage to talk Capcom around to seeing the worth in rereleasing them, showing, at the very least, the company was willing to shift its position.
Paczynski also went on to state the response to the trilogy had been "absolutely phenomenal", and that their release "proved that there is an audience for [...] the versions we all remember from our childhood", as they had previously anticipated.