Resident Evil 4. The game that people have been waiting five years for, is finally on it's way. It's history has been a long and twisted one which reaches back to 1999, after the release of Resident Evil 3 on the PlayStation One. Straight away people were expecting an "official" fourth title due to the releases of Code Veronica on Dreamcast, the announcment of Zero on the Nintendo 64 and Gun Survivor on the PlayStation One as well.

Sure enough the game was announced as on it's way by the time Capcom had it's Gamers Day in Jan of 2000. The director was announced as Hideki Kamiya, the director of Resident Evil 2, and the game was supposed to have some close connections to Europe, as the team had gone on a trip to see Spanish design specifically. The game was expected to make it's first showing already at the E3.... however this wasn't to be the case. Rumors began to do the rounds and it wasn't until November we got an answer.

Capcom announced that Code Veronica would be coming to the PS2 and aside from that a new project for the PS2 called Devil May Cry would be released, which was commented on as being created from a scrapped Biohazard game. Given the director was none other than the same one originally marked for Resident Evil 4, the platform, and the style, it didn't take long to guess that game was Resident Evil 4.

No replacement for the game was announced after Devil May Cry's announcement and yet another E3 in 2001 came and went with nothing new other than the comment that "it is coming." This lasted until September of that year when Capcom made the announcement of the "Capcom 5" to the Nintendo Gamecube, follow the announcment that Resident Evil Zero was already going there. The five titles; Viewtiful Joe, Killer7, Dead Pheonix, Biohazard (Remake), and Biohazard 4, were to be released over the next couple of years. However the focus on the Biohazard remake and Biohazard Zero, meant that news and info on 4 would be a little while away.

And that it was. The next news wouldn't be until over a year later in November 2002, when Capcom showed off the first footage of the new look Biohazard 4 in Japan. The footage hit the web with quite a bit of fuss until Capcom posted the video itself along with new screens later in the month, with a few words by the new director, Hiroshi Shibata. Between this and the next lot of footage shown off at the E3, Capcom released small news bits, but apart from the new set of images and the trailer movie shown in May and then again in September, news had gone dead again.

While it was expected this was due to preperations by the end of 2003, rumor was about with delays and changes. It wouldn't be until the start of 2004 when this would all come together. Capcom's own gamers day would again be the place for news - a shock announcement. The game has been overhauled again, the third time, and now Shinji Mikami is in charge as director. News of the title was first released through the magazine Game Informer, before later going web wide a month later. The first proper footage of the game was released by Famitsu through their Wave magazine and DVD. Right now we wait for more information and media, hopefully to be released at the E3.