Interview: Resident Evil Requiem bosses talk leaks, Switch 2, and remakes

Next year marks the 30th anniversary of Resident Evil, one of the most iconic series in video games.

The anniversary will be marked with the release of the ninth main game in the series, Resident Evil Requiem – coincidentally the 30th Resident Evil release overall when spin-offs and remakes are taken into account – but that wasn’t actually Capcom‘s original plan.

This was just one of the revelations (pun intended) revealed by Requiem’s director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Kumazawa when I sat down with them at Tokyo Game Show to discuss the game’s development.

During our conversation, the pair gave their opinion on such topics as leak culture, developing on Switch 2, the resurrection of Silent Hill and the dropped content from Resident Evil 7 that they’d like to see reinstated one day.

Resident Evil Requiem will be released on February 27, 2026 – three weeks before the series turns 30 – on all current-gen formats including Nintendo Switch 2.

This marks the first time since Resident Evil 4 two decades ago that a new mainline Resident Evil game will arrive on a Nintendo console on day one, something also discussed in our conversation below.

It’s a big anniversary year for Resident Evil, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary. How much did that factor into your thinking when you planned Requiem? How much did you think about the series’ past when you came to designing this one?

Masato Kumazawa: It actually wasn’t planned specifically to be a game releasing in the anniversary year. But due to the schedule of the project, and as we went through trial and error in the development phase, it ended up landing in the 30th anniversary year.

So I think we’ve often had people reading something into the anniversary and the return of Raccoon City, like it was all part of the plan from the beginning, but they were actually two quite separate things originally.

Let’s say, once it did land at the current release date, we felt a certain amount of responsibility or pressure to be the game that brings the series to that anniversary point.

In some of the trailers that we’ve seen so far, there are hints at flashback sequences. Will we get to see much of Raccoon City in its prime?

MK: We think it’s important to balance the extra fun that you get from nostalgic Easter Eggs and hints and lore connections if you’re a series fan, versus not making a game alienating to players who aren’t caught up. I don’t want people to feel they have to do their homework to fully appreciate this game.

So while we’re not really going into exactly how much and what you’ll see of Raccoon City throughout the full game, I think that if you don’t know anything about it, you’re just going to play this as a horror game set in a ruined city, and you’ll be able to understand and enjoy it 100%.

If you’re a fan and you see all the connections and the lore links and the background hints and stuff, I think you’ll enjoy it 150%, and it’ll give you that extra level of detail, but we don’t want to make it so that you have to know about the incident and understand the relationship between that timeline in order to understand the game.

A lot of planning and thought goes into when Capcom announces its games and how it reveals information, to surprise and delight fans. But, of course, sometimes information leaks outside of marketing plans. How disruptive is that for the development team? Is it stressful for you?

Koshi Nakanishi: In a way, I can take it personally as a positive thing, because the fact that people are so interested that they want to see the information we haven’t revealed yet, and then they start discussing online and speculating about things and reading those kind of information, it shows a huge amount of interest and passion on behalf of the fans.

So I can try and make my mind to take it as a positive thing that they really want to know more about the game, because they ultimately want to buy it.

That said, not all leaks are right. There are things out there that are wrong or on the right track, or on the wrong track, so we don’t really know until the game actually comes out whether it was disruptive to our plans or not, because it may not even be related to anything we’re doing.

Have you considered maybe putting some fake leaks out there, speaking loudly in a bar about some pretend characters, or similar?

KN: We don’t need to make fake leaks, we’ve got enough out there already!

MK: Information appearing online in the form of a leak, whether it’s true or not, doesn’t really annoy me so much as the fact that information that has not yet been confirmed gets treated as gospel by people who just decided that it must be true.

They think about the game on that basis, so it becomes a betrayal if it ends up being we didn’t do what we promised, even though we never promised it. That’s the part that I find most disruptive about leaks – at some point they just become true in people’s minds, even though they’ve never been confirmed.

“Information appearing online in the form of a leak, whether it’s true or not, doesn’t really annoy me so much as the fact that information that has not yet been confirmed gets treated as gospel by people who just decided that it must be true.”

Requiem is going to be the first mainline Resident Evil entry to release on day one on a Nintendo platform in decades. Why has it taken so long to return to a Nintendo platform with that much commitment?

MK: Although we have released ports of the games to Nintendo platforms over the years, as you said, this is a bit more all-in on being day one on Switch 2, and that’s simply because when we got the Switch 2 hardware, we were surprised in a good way about how smooth the process was for us to bring the existing development version of the game to that platform.

It just made sense that we felt that we don’t need to wait on this one or do a separate project after the main game, we can just bring the main game to this hardware immediately.

I was going to ask how the RE Engine has scaled to Switch 2, but it sounds like it went more smoothly than you expected?

KN: Well, the game was already being made in a kind of highly scalable way, so it wasn’t that difficult for the console platforms and also high end PCs with path tracing and that kind of thing, so adding the Switch 2 into that mix was just a case of somewhere else to scale it to rather than a particularly massive challenge.

So has it always been a technical mismatch with past Nintendo platforms? I’m interested to know whether Capcom sees Resident Evil as a good fit for the Nintendo audience. Is Requiem more of a test, or a starting gun for the series on Switch 2?

MK: Nothing is set in stone for the future of the series, but we always have in our mind that we want to bring games in the Resident Evil series to as many players as we can, and we’ll factor that into any future decisions about hardware platforms.

One of the big topics at the moment around Switch 2 are the Game Key Cards. As a team making one of the most technically intense Switch 2 games, so far, is data streaming an issue when you’re putting a game onto a card, as some other developers have suggested? Basically, are Game Key Cards a developer consideration, or a publishing one?

KN: It’s not a development decision for us, it’s more of a sales strategy decision.

Capcom actively adds new technical features to its RE Engine with each title, in theory benefiting future games, so could the ground work putting Requiem on Switch 2 in theory benefit future titles?

KN: I don’t know yet, because we’re still making it! But it’s true that that’s how we work. Our original Village prototype taught us about things we needed to do for Requiem, and putting out Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess on Switch 2 allowed us to bring knowhow from that project onto this one.

When we release and finish Requiem, we will then pass forward the learnings and knowhow from this game. But we’re not quite there yet.

MK: There’s a team dedicated to RE Engine and cross-project idea sharing, so they do that work for us. If in the process of development we learn something, they can take that straight away. It’s a very efficient process.

What can you tell me about the decision to release RE7, Village, and Requiem all at the same time? What was the thinking behind that decision rather than staggering those releases?

MK: Actually, Village was the game we first prototyped and tried out on Switch 2 hardware when we first got the kit.

We had cloud versions originally for Resident Evil 7 that ran on the first Nintendo Switch, so we had a bit of a baseline there for the hardware itself – its predecessor at least – and Village running natively on Switch 2 was such a smooth process that we thought: “Oh. Well, we can look at Requiem as well”.

That, as we said, went smoothly, so we had two of the three kind of working at that point, and we were like “well, let’s go the whole hog and add in 7”.

It just made sense to us to release them all at the same time when Requiem comes out, so that in one go, you go from not having these games on Switch 2 to – if someone is a new player and they want to check out the three most recent games in the series – they can just jump in. You can go from the new game, or start at 7 and go through to 9.

It feels like the big budget survival horror space is in much better health than before you released Resident Evil 7, with Silent Hill most recently receiving critical praise. Do you welcome increased competition in the genre?

KN: I welcome it. Competition is what keeps everyone on their toes in a given genre or space within the gaming industry, so I think it’s great to have more titles in the AAA survival horror space. I really want to buy Silent Hill F, I’m playing it straight away!

“Competition is what keeps everyone on their toes in a given genre or space within the gaming industry, so I think it’s great to have more titles in the AAA survival horror space. I really want to buy Silent Hill F, I’m playing it straight away!”

When Capcom eventually get around to remaking Resident Evil 7 and Village in 20 years’ time, what updates and changes would you make?

KN: I could talk for hours, because nobody is every fully satisfied with a game that they directed. My desktop is covered in proverbial post-it notes with things I wanted to do but didn’t get around to. I have so many details in my mind.

For example, the first time you enter the Baker house, the door slams shut behind you, it’s dark, and you turn on the torch. The amount of time between the door closing, you being faced with complete darkness, and the torch turning on, never quite sat right with me. 

We had to make it not too long, so players wouldn’t be confused and run around in the dark, but if it was too short there would be not atmosphere. I would like to tune that a little bit more. There are various other little things like that throughout the game.

There was also a character, another member of the Baker family, who we ended up having to cut from the game, so with a remake we could maybe add them back in. Lucas was supposed to have a girlfriend who lived with them, and she would play a part in the story. I think it would be interesting to produce a Director’s Cut with that content added back in.

How many names did you get through before you gave up trying to find something with ‘IX’ in it?

KN: We actually didn’t think of any! We weren’t going to do it. We were just like “that’s not going to work”. We didn’t feel like had to follow the formula this time, so we decided on Requiem, and then later realised that we could twist that and have it be a different version of the same thing.