For the last twenty-five years, Devil May Cry has been a major hit for Capcom. Dante has become an icon of the action-adventure genre, with plenty of terrific boss battles and intense fight sequences. It still stands out as one of the most influential action games of its era, laying the seeds for the hack-and-slash’s return to prominence. It also provided an over-the-top and purposefully excessive contrast to Capcom’s other major horror franchise, Resident Evil.
While some entries in the Resident Evil series have featured plenty of action, the series has always been defined much more by the tense survival-horror tone. That’s what makes Devil May Cry‘s initial development as a Resident Evil spin-off all the more surprising. 25 years later, Capcom’s faith in their development team led to a potentially scrapped Resident Evil sequel becoming a massive franchise all its own.
The game that eventually became Devil May Cry was first formally announced at the tail end of 1999, just under two years before it debuted on August 23, 2001 — but those initial plans would have seen it released as Resident Evil 4. Hideki Kamiya was put in charge of the project and opted to take the series in a more stylized approach to action than the much more deliberate and tense prior entries in the series. As development went on, more and more changes to the Resident Evil formula were introduced. The main character, “Tony,” was a superhuman warrior (and a far cry from the more grounded protagonists of previous games). The battles didn’t flow as well with a fixed camera angle, leading the developers to drop the standard pre-rendered backgrounds and replace them with a more dynamic camera system. Rather than taking visual inspiration from zombie movies and leaning into the gritty aesthetic of the prior games, this one went medieval with its influences, choosing instead to base designs off Gothic artwork.
After seeing just how far the game had strayed from the Resident Evil formula, producer Shinji Mikami spun the team off into their own direction. Resident Evil 4 entered a long period of fluctuating development, eventually taking cues from the more action-driven approach but retaining more of the survival-horror tone. Kamiya, liberated from the constraints of the established franchise, leaned even harder into the gothic influences. The story began to take overt cues from the epic poem “Dante’s Inferno,” gaining more openly supernatural and demonic elements now that the game was free from the Resident Evil bio-terrorism angle. The main character, “Tony,” was renamed Dante as an allusion to that poem’s influence on the growing game. Dante also changed as a character, losing the more self-serious Resident Evil aspects. Instead, he gained more casual charm and ridiculous skills. The stylized nature of the gameplay and the more bombastic characters informed one another throughout the rest of development, leading to the purposefully over-the-top Devil May Cry that fans know today.
In the grand scheme of things, this approach to evolving development was a major success for Capcom. Freed from the expectations of being part of the publisher’s biggest horror property, Devil May Cry was able to flourish. Critics and audiences alike responded well to the game’s stylized approach, earning rave reviews and selling over 2 million copies within five years. It spawned its own franchise with a distinctive tone and sense of action-adventure, giving Capcom the ideal contrast to their other in-house scary franchise. Resident Evil was able to remain more focused on survival-horror, even if it also increasingly embraced action in the wake of Resident Evil 4‘s subsequent massive success. The game helped revitalize the hack-and-slash subgenre for the 3D age, laying the groundwork for games like Ninja Gaiden and God of War. The legacy of Devil May Cry was strong enough to inspire several sequels as well as other games like Bayonetta, quickly becoming one of Capcom’s most successful franchises of the 21st century.
More than anything, Devil May Cry excelled by bucking traditional approaches to game development. It only came to be because the company was able to push past the natural risk of experimentation and let the developers make the game they were working on instead of trying to force them to adhere to a more standard approach. Instead of sticking too closely to the source material, the developers wanted to make a truly unique game that didn’t feel too much like any game that came before it. Instead of shutting down the project when it became too different, Capcom allowed it to grow. Instead of producing something broadly appealing and subsequently basic, the Devil May Cry team produced something wholly unique and explosively popular. Devil May Cry may be one of modern gaming’s best examples of how a rocky development cycle can produce something truly great if the artists are given the confidence and space to work.
