Within the Resident Evil universe, the story of Raccoon City is one of tragedy. An entire city having to deal with rioting due to the mysterious illness Cannibal Disease.
Or wait a minute. It was a biohazard that may or may not come from an Umbrella Corporation lab.
No, that’s not it, it was actually a radiation spill.
Three different stories were told about what was happening but the ending stays the same: the U.S. government launched a missile strike that wiped Raccoon City off the map.
The real story is that the relationship Umbrella Corporation had with the American government is the driving force behind the disaster. This was a monster they made together. And when it got loose, they burned a city to hide the evidence.
A Partnership Built on Mutual Convenience
It started, as these things always do, with shared goals and lots of money.
Through the 1980s, Umbrella Corporation was already a pharmaceutical giant with global reach. Secretly, they became one of the most valuable defense contractors the US government had.
Oswell E. Spencer, Umbrella’s visionary and sinister co-founder, had spent decades cultivating relationships with politicians across multiple governments. He understood that power isn’t just about what you own. It’s about who owes you.
The arrangement that emerged was elegant in its corruption. Umbrella provided t-Virus variants and early B.O.W. prototypes to covert US military programs. It was biological weapons research the government couldn’t pursue publicly without violating the Biological Weapons Convention it had signed. In return, Umbrella received something more valuable than money: protection. Scrutiny disappeared, investigations stalled. The underground labs kept running.
To cement the relationship further, both sides embedded agents in each other’s organizations. Government spies inside Umbrella facilities. Umbrella operatives inside US agencies.
This is the detail that tends to get glossed over. This was co-ownership. The US government wasn’t watching Umbrella. It was the corporation’s partner, kept at arm’s length, with just enough deniability to sleep at night.
The Fracture Point: William Birkin and the G-Virus
By 1998, Dr. William Birkin had developed something that made the t-Virus look primitive. The G-Virus, a parasitic pathogen capable of radical, regenerative mutation.
Birkin, sensing that Umbrella’s internal politics had turned against him, decided to defect. His plan was to sell the G-Virus directly to US military authorities, cutting Umbrella out entirely. The military, for their part, were apparently more than willing. Getting their hands on the G-Virus through Birkin would let them sever the increasingly messy Umbrella arrangement and develop their own tightly controlled B.O.W. program.
What neither Birkin nor his military contacts accounted for was that Umbrella had eyes inside the agencies they were negotiating with. Umbrella’s moles learned of the planned handoff. The Umbrella Security Service (the USS) was dispatched to intercept Birkin and take the G-Virus before the military could reach him.
They shot him and a dying Birkin injected himself with the G-Virus rather than let them have it.
Everything that followed, the t-Virus spreading into Raccoon City’s sewers, the outbreak, tens of thousands dead, all stems from one decision to use embedded spies to protect a corporate asset. The zombie apocalypse that consumed Raccoon City wasn’t a lab accident in the traditional sense. It was the collateral damage of a covert turf war between two partners who had stopped trusting each other.
The Sterilization Operation
On October 1, 1998, the US government authorized the complete destruction of Raccoon City.
The official story was that it’s a necessary measure to contain a viral outbreak. In reality, it was a cover-up to shield the government from public and legal backlash.
National Security Advisor Derek C. Simmons manipulated the Congressional committee responsible for authorizing the strike. His goal was to ensure the physical evidence linking the US government to Umbrella’s bioweapons programs went up in flames along with the city.
Think about what that means. An entire American city, all to make sure that no lab, documents, or underground facility survived to reveal the full story.
Some critics argue this political angle is underdeveloped. That the games spend so much time on action or surviving gruesome monsters that the governmental conspiracy never gets the serious treatment it deserves. It’s an arc that could have more development. But the fact that it operates in the background, revealed through documents and loading-screen files instead of cutscenes, is arguably the point. This is how real institutional corruption works. It’s hidden in plain sight.
Wesker’s Leak and the Push to Expose the Truth
By 2003, the dam was breaking.
Albert Wesker, a rogue, megalomaniac operating for his own goals, infiltrated Umbrella’s Caucasus facility. He assassinated its final director, Sergei Vladimir, before accessing UMF-013, Umbrella’s master database. What he found there was the complete archive of Umbrella’s crimes: executive orders authorizing B.O.W. development, records of the Arklay Mansion outbreak, documentation of the contamination of Raccoon City’s sewers. The works.
Wesker didn’t release all of it. He anonymously submitted select excerpts to international prosecutors during the Raccoon Trials. Enough to bury Umbrella, not enough to fully implicate himself.
Meanwhile, the survivors of Raccoon City never stopped fighting to expose Umbrella’s crimes. Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield had been trying to expose the company since the Spencer Mansion Incident in 1996 (Resident Evil 1), two years before the Raccoon City Outbreak. They founded and joined the BSAA (Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance) and kept the pressure up. Chris in particular was relentless.
Survivors like journalist Alyssa Ashcroft published articles explaining what Bio-Organic Weapons (B.O.W.s) are and Umbrella’s role in creating them. This helped maintain public outrage and media scrutiny towards Umbrella. Testimony from survivors like Leon S. Kennedy, Alyssa and Claire Redfield in court, provided firsthand accounts that pressured authorities despite cover-ups.
The result was that Umbrella declared bankruptcy. Assets were frozen. By 2004, the corporation that had once been untouchable was legally dissolved.
And the US government? They got to prosecute. They played the hero in the final act of a story they had helped write from the beginning. Classified evidence of their purchases and partnerships stayed classified. Derek C. Simmons continued operating at the highest levels of power for another fifteen years, until Leon S. Kennedy finally crossed his path in 2013.
What Gets Left Behind
Raccoon City’s destruction didn’t end the story.
Umbrella’s researchers scattered. Their technology spread to black market arms dealers, religious cults, rogue governments, and shadow organizations. Every bioterrorism incident in the franchise’s later games: the Las Plagas crisis, the Uroboros attacks in Africa, the C-Virus, trace back to that original partnership between a pharmaceutical empire and a government.
Resident Evil has never really been about zombies. It’s about the ways institutions avoid accountability. The monsters are just the mechanism.
