Long-time Resident Evil fans know that the franchise is full of Easter eggs. Developer and publisher Capcom is fond of including references to a variety of popular and influential franchises, and if you’re attentive enough, you’ll notice a myriad of them discreetly hidden in plain sight.
It’s quite rare for a game to have an unintentional Easter egg, but do you know what’s even rarer than that? To have in-game content that unintentionally becomes an Easter egg due to unforeseen events that take place in the future. Well, this is exactly what happened with 2017’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. There’s a book in-game that simply has the title “2020.”
A screenshot of the book was shared by the Twitter account known as “No Context Resident Evil.” It’s a fairly popular account despite the fact that it’s an unofficial one that basically posts random screenshots from the series on a daily basis.
In the tweet, the fan account shared a photo featuring the 2020 book among other abandoned titles sitting on a dust bookshelf with the caption “RE7 has a book titled ‘2020.'” As expected of the account, no other context was provided about the book and why it exists in the game’s world.
Not only that, it doesn’t look like the rest of the books are based on real-life titles that you can get from a bookstore. As such, the fact that a random book referencing the year 2020 in a game such as Resident Evil 7 is truly frightful.
— DaLoon69 (@Daloony69) December 29, 2020
You may be wondering why fans are turning a random book into an Easter egg, but the book’s title speaks for itself at this point. For many people all over the globe, 2020 has been a horrifying year, and it makes sense that a book in a horror game would reference that albeit unintentionally.
We also have to consider the fact that Resident Evil 7 was released three years ago, and the fact that the developers randomly chose the year 2020 to convey dark connotations changes what could have been an amusing coincidence to something more chilling.
That being said, the addition of the 2020 book isn’t worth overanalyzing. The closest possibility is that the developer who worked on the original asset probably just wanted to invoke obscure feelings of fear towards the future or perhaps they felt like including some kind of inside joke. If this Easter egg gets enough attention, maybe someone can ask one of the developers who worked on Resident Evil 7 about it during an interview.
In any case, it’s worth mentioning that the haunting 2020 book actually appeared in another title from the franchise. One fan who goes by @Daloony69 on Twitter shared a screenshot from Resident Evil 2 Remake that shows the same exact bookshelf asset and it includes the same 2020 book as well.
As we can see, Capcom is simply reusing the same asset across its different Resident Evil games to make things more convenient for the developers. Who knows? Maybe that same, unintentionally prophetic book will once again make an appearance in Resident Evil Village.
