It was the tiger statue, in the small corridor opposite the keeper’s room, where you find the infamous “itchy, tasty” diary, that really got me. By 2002 I must have completed 1996’s original Resident Evil maybe a hundred times. In my more obsessive phases, when I was learning how to speedrun and trying to beat what was then the record time of one hour and 17 minutes, I’d play the game start to finish maybe three or four times a day, drilling every boss fight, enemy dodge and item pickup to near perfection — there was nothing left in Resident Evil to surprise me. But this time, when I inserted the red gem and waited the exactly four seconds it would take for the statue to spit out the Colt Python, I was caught off-guard.
