Raccoon City

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A map of Raccoon City.

Raccoon City is a fictional city appearing in the Resident Evil series of survival horror video games developed by Capcom. It serves as the primary setting for Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, the spinoffs Resident Evil: Outbreak and Resident Evil: Outbreak: File 2 . It also serves as the main setting in the first two film adaptations of the series. At the end of Nemesis, the city is depicted as being destroyed by a single thermonuclear missile.

[edit] Geography and characteristics

The remains of Raccoon City (notice the three craters within a larger crater).

The Toronto City Hall, on which the city hall of Raccoon City was based.

Raccoon City is a fictional city in the United States and serves as the setting for four Resident Evil video games. The city and its outlying areas house several bioengineering laboratories belonging to the Umbrella Corporation. These laboratories develop viruses that can mutate humans and animals. One of the laboratories, unnamed in the video games, referred to as "The Hive" in the film adaptations, is located under Raccoon City and is the producer of the T-virus. These viruses are the plot devices driving the story behind the games; sabotage and security failures have unleashed these viruses and infected creatures on Raccoon City, and players have to escape the city. During gameplay, Raccoon City appears mostly devastated due to the panic and fighting caused by the viral outbreak. Small fires, crashed vehicles and other barricades frequently impede players' progress through the city.

[edit] In films

Raccoon City is depicted in the films as a 21st-century cosmopolitan city with an infrastructure largely funded by the Umbrella Corporation. The first two films feature the Hive as a secret underground laboratory under the city. Housing more than 500 employees, the facility has an artificial intelligence, the Red Queen, controlling its security.^[1] The theft and deliberate release of the T-virus starts the chain of events depicted in the opening of the first film. Although the Hive is sealed off at the end of the film, it is reopened in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, by the Umbrella Corporation. Infected creatures spread out of the re-opened Hive into Raccoon City and Umbrella places the city under quarantine. In an attempt to stop the spread of the T-virus, Umbrella destroys Raccoon City with a nuclear missile near the end of the film; unfortunately, (as revealed in the third film) this does not stop the virus from spreading, and within five years, the human race is on the verge of extinction, and the vast majority of the Earth is a barren wasteland crawling with zombies and mutated animals.

Instead of creating large sets for Raccoon City and the Hive, the film crew filmed on location at Toronto, Canada and Berlin, Germany. Due to the fictional city being located in the American Midwest, the film's director Paul Anderson chose Toronto to serve as the fictional city. The city was filmed untouched, and many of its prominent features, such as its city hall and the CN Tower, are visible in the films.^[2][3] For the underground train station in the Hive, Anderson chose to film in the Berlin U-Bahn. He said that the atmosphere of the underground labyrinth structure was conducive to the acting and promoted a sense of realism and mood in the production.^[2] Resident Evil: Extinction features another Hive in Death Valley, which is used for the research of a cure to the T-virus and of the Tyrant Program.

[edit] The Hive

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (July 2009)

A diagram of the Hive in the film showing its exits to Raccoon City above it and to Spencer Mansion on the city's outskirts.

The Hive is a fictional underground laboratory in which illegal experiments were held. Throughout the series, there are different Hives and only the first film shows the Hive as an underground research facility which conducts legal tests, only to be ruined by Spence, whom he thought could bring an end to the Umbrella Corporation. The outbreak varies from location and its causes. Director Paul W.S. Anderson developed furthermore the incident throughout the series. The Hive is one of the prominent locations to reveal what events lead to worldwide outbreak.

[edit] References