The developers behind fan remakes of Resident Evil and Resident Evil Code: Veronica has announced that development on both projects has ceased after Capcom allegedly contacted them and asked the developers to cancel the project. Two years ago, Briins Croft, Matt Croft, and the animator DarkNemesisUmbrella started their own remake project for the games.
In a video announcing the Code: Veronica project’s cancellation, Briins Croft said that 90 percent of the Code: Veronica fan remake used existing assets from Capcom’s recent “Remake” games, such as 3D models, animations, and textures. The fans released an initial Code: Veronica demo back in June 2021 and planned to put out a much more substantial one at the beginning of 2023. Originally, the news was broken through Briin’s discord channel, and reported by Biohazard Declassified via Twitter.
On December 23, Briins Croft announced on the projects’ Discord server that Capcom had sent them two cease-and-desist emails. One was “very kind” and inquired about where the animations and models had come from. The second was “hostile with a more aggressive tone.”
The fan developers believed that Capcom canceled their unofficial remakes for being too visible and official-looking. “[The Code: Veronica remake] was going to be free, so we weren’t doing anyone any harm,” Croft said in the cancellation announcement video. The publisher seemed to disagree. Capcom allegedly cited copyright factors and licensing agreements as reasons why the project couldn’t proceed.
“I was personally a bit surprised by Capcom’s decision. But hey, we were using [their] toys to create a free game, which was already creating a lot of visibility,” said Croft in the video. “So it’s ok. We can understand the cancellation.”
The developers’ announcements in their Discord were significantly less genial. “[Capcom] canceled it out of pure evil, since there are no signs that an official Code: Veronica is coming from them,” Briins wrote on the server. He also posted a meme that compared Capcom to Nintendo, which has a reputation for enforcing its copyrights aggressively.
The team will no longer be working on the Resident Evil remakes but will continue developing games. “We will continue a new project that will have a story inspired by Code: Veronica but without copyright problems.” The website has be scrubbed, and while the URL exists, all content from the website has been removed.
Fans, however, have taken this Cease and Desist/Cancellation of the Resident Evil and Code: Veronica remakes by Briins, and his team as a sign that Capcom might be open to making a Code: Veronica remake should the upcoming Resident Evil 4 remake be successful.
After all, it’s not the first time that canceling a fan remake of a Resident Evil game has resulted in an official remake being created since a highly respected Resident Evil 2 HD remake was canceled back in 2015, then Capcom announced that they were making their own Resident Evil 2 remake to overwhelming success.
Resident Evil 4 producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi recently confirmed to IGN that there were no plans for a new Code: Veronica remake. Sure Capcom, sure.
