Resident Evil Timeline: Mind-Blowing Secrets REVEALED! What You MISSED!

Okay, folks, let's talk Resident Evil. With *Resident Evil Requiem* looming on the horizon – the ninth mainline game, if you can believe it – now's the perfect time for a refresher course on the series' utterly bonkers timeline. For newcomers, jumping straight into *Requiem* would be like walking into a Shakespeare play halfway through; you *might* get the gist, but you'd miss so much context. So, before you're knee-deep in whatever bio-horrors Capcom has cooked up for us this time, let's break down the essentials, shall we?

Resident Evil Timeline: Mind-Blowing Secrets REVEA...

It all kicks off on July 23, 1998. Yeah, the 90s. Feels like yesterday, doesn’t it? Anyway, Raccoon City's elite S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics And Rescue Service) division gets called in to investigate a string of gruesome murders up in the Arklay Mountains. Think creepy backwoods territory meets zombie apocalypse. Bravo Team, one of the S.T.A.R.S. squads, takes to the air, but their chopper goes down, leaving young Rebecca Chambers as one of the only survivors. She finds herself holed up in, you guessed it, a seriously ominous-looking mansion, all the while searching for her missing teammates.

Before our intrepid Rebecca even gets *inside* the mansion proper, she teams up with a convict named Billy Coen (talk about a mismatched duo!). Together, they stumble across an abandoned training facility – and this is where things start to get *really* interesting. They unearth a truly horrifying secret: some seriously messed-up science was going on. Turns out, former director Dr. James Marcus, along with his former partner Oswell E. Spencer, were the brains behind the T-Virus, a deadly bioweapon capable of turning people into… well, you know, the undead. And a whole lot of other nasty critters, too. We’re talking zombie dogs, giant spiders, the whole shebang.

Then comes S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team, including series mainstays Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Barry Burton, and their leader, the seemingly unflappable Albert Wesker. They're sent in to find out what happened to Bravo Team. Their search leads them straight to the Spencer Mansion, where they discover the truly gruesome fates of their missing comrades, all victims of the T-virus. It's at this point you realize, "Okay, this isn't just a simple missing persons case anymore." Understatement of the century.

Exploring the mansion's hidden chambers, Chris runs into Rebecca, still alive and kicking (for now). Working together, Jill and Chris uncover the truth: the Umbrella Corporation, a seemingly legitimate pharmaceutical company, is actually a front for some seriously shady bio-weaponry experiments. These are the guys responsible for unleashing the undead horrors roaming the mansion. But the rabbit hole goes even deeper.

Deep beneath the mansion, in a hidden lab, they discover Wesker's a traitor! He's been playing them all along, working for Umbrella the whole time. In a bizarre twist, Wesker infects himself with a strain of the T-virus, thinking it will give him superpowers or something. He unleashes a new bioweapon – the Tyrant – but, karma being what it is, the Tyrant immediately kills him. The surviving S.T.A.R.S. members manage to defeat the Tyrant and escape the lab, thankfully relatively unscathed. But the nightmare is far from over. Oh no, it's just getting started. Fast forward a couple months…