There are Resident Evil fans, and then there’s TheBatMan.
That’s the name perhaps the biggest Resident Evil fan in the world goes by online.
I’ve spent the last few weeks lurking in a Discord called The Resident Evil Podcast, a channel dedicated to discussion of Resident Evil lore. It is a vibrant community, packed with debate about Capcom’s sprawling horror series. The people in it really, really care about Resident Evil, and co-founder TheBatMan is revered. Every now and then you see posts from people debating some contentious issue in the lore, and someone steps in to say, well, let’s wait and see what TheBatMan has to say about that.
And so they should, because TheBatMan has created perhaps the most complete and in-depth fan project ever conceived: a 2700-page long document, a decade in the making, that details the entire mythology of the Resident Evil series.
The timeline you can read now is actually the fourth iteration of a document that began life on popular fansite Biohaze back in 2006. Updates came in 2008 and then 2009, before the project was put on ice following the release of Resident Evil 5. It remained dormant until TheBatMan, a UK resident who has been a fan of Resident Evil since 1997 (“when a trip to my local Blockbuster video to rent out Ace Combat 2 on the PS1 resulted in me coming home with Resident Evil instead”), restarted the project, working to piece together Capcom’s spiralling storyline over the course of over 10 years.