Origins of Devil May Cry

Did you know that before DMC was in the pre-production phase and just fresh off the drawing board, DMC was intended to be the next title in the Resident Evil series, Resident Evil 4, but with a new twist? After Capcom had released Resident Evil: Code Veronica for the Sega Dreamcast several years ago, the producer behind the series apparently told his staff “Make me a revolutionary Biohazard game”, and from those brief words the team began crafting ideas to take the Resident Evil series in a whole new direction.

But later on in the development stage, the crew came up with the idea of moulding this new concept into a brand new game, which would later be known as DMC and become a sort of unofficial spin-off of the Resident Evil series. In fact alot of the inspiration behind the enemies in DMC were in fact derived from the creatures you might find scattered around Residents Evil’s Racoon City. The Marionettes you face very early in DMC were loosely based on the slow, shuffling zombies that were made famous in Resident Evil. “Blade”, the reptilian soldier foes you face in DMC were at one point based around Resident Evil’s “hunter” monsters.

In fact, before they had finally settled down with the name DMC, Capcom were considering calling the title “Devil May Care” after the popular saying, but due to the fact that the name had already been branded by other titles such as movies and other media they decided against it. The team then began looking for a title that was more original and a name they could license and upon extensive debate the crew finally came up with “DMC” and a brand new gaming series was born.

As the new game was taking shape, and the location for the games setting was being decided on, the game’s director, Hideki Kamiya and team travelled to both England and Spain to gain some gather information from the ancient castles and architecture, which would soon be the inspiration for the game’s setting.

When early betas of the original DMC were released and articles written in gaming magazines, there was alot of fascination drawn around the game. It seemed as though Capcom was returning to its hack and slash roots but implementing the revolutionary new technology we have today and enabling the team to add stunning visuals, excellent quality music and audio as well as life-like physics and mechanics.

And when DMC was finally ready for release, it was greeted with massive excitement and was a phenomenal hit worldwide. The game was so successful it was able to spawn two sequels, with a fourth now in the works for the upcoming Sony Playstation 3.