Here's what you need to know about "Resident Evil": the story is strange, convoluted, and yet seriously compelling. Over the franchise's more than twenty-year life span, over thirty games have been released on various platforms because let's face it: the series has a premise that's hard to beat. Resident Evil made zombies into bigger, better monsters, and the T-virus made us all be more mindful about washing our hands. The Capcom games invented and arguably perfected the survival horror genre and managed to frighten the heck out of players even with '90s-era graphics.

Like the zombies in the games, the "Resident Evil" franchise is practically immortal, even if the story sometimes seems to shamble and stumble here and there. Typically, players can make it through a game shooting and dodging rotten, dripping creatures without really knowing what's going on, the gameplay is powerful enough to propel players without a backstory. However, we're going to dig in and chronologically decipher the whole "Resident Evil" story thus far.

Resident Evil Zero was released in 2002, but is set in July of 1998 and serves as a prequel to the very first game. There's something shady and cannibalistic happening in the Arklay Mountains outside the metropolis of Raccoon City. The Bravo Team of Raccoon City police's Special Tactics And Rescue Service (STARS) is investigating when their helicopter crashes. They split up like any group in a horror movie, leaving Officer Rebecca Chambers alone. She discovers a crashed train that had been attacked by leeches, who transmitted the transformative T-virus to the passengers, turning them into zombified monsters.

Escaped convict and wrongfully convicted Marine Billy Coen is also on the train, which they both become trapped on as it starts moving again. Diverting the out-of-control train, they find themselves in an abandoned facility that is also crawling with mutated insects, apes, and a sizable bat. They discover that the facility is the birthplace of the T-virus: the Umbrella pharmaceutical corporation wanted to make a bio-weapon by combining the Progenitor virus with leech DNA. The body of assassinated scientist James Marcus had been possessed by his infected Queen Leech, and she — believing herself to be Marcus — has a vendetta against Umbrella, leading her to attack the train.

Rebecca finds out that the rest of her team are investigating a nearby mansion, but first she and Billy have to take down Marcus. Upon escape, Rebecca goes to meet up with her team, and Billy has his freedom (he was "killed in the train crash," after all).

Resident Evil" gives murder mansion a whole new meaning. The first game was released in 1996, but remade in 2002. The day after the helicopter crash, the STARS Alpha Team are searching for the Bravo Team when they are attacked by mutated dogs. The helicopter takes off without them, so they take refuge in a local mansion which turns out to be filled with more monsters. The gang splits up and Jill Valentine (or Chris Redfield if the player wants to try hard mode) discovers that there are tons of booby traps and puzzles among the terrors in the mansion, which is actually another testing facility for Umbrella. Creatures — human and animal — that were exposed to the T-virus have mutated.

In an underground lab beneath the mansion, the player discovers that it was their teammate Albert Wesker who had been working for the unscrupulous Umbrella all along. But wait! Barry has also betrayed the player! But only because the dastardly Wesker has his family held hostage. Wesker is working on unleashing the Tyrant, a horrifying monster that is part-super-soldier and all-ugly. Barry manages to snipe Wesker, but the monster is unleashed. Meeting up with the rest of the STARS, the player fills them in and hits a convenient self-destruct button. Depending on which of the four endings the player gets, the Tyrant either escapes or is blown to smithereens, after which the survivors fly away in a helicopter.