At the end of Resident Evil 3, Jill Valentine rides off in a helicopter as the missile strike hits. She watches Raccoon City disappear from the sky. A place where she lived, gone. All because the government didn’t want anyone finding out about a failed experiment that ruined people’s lives.
That image tells you everything about what Raccoon City was. It wasn’t some city overrun by zombies. It was a conspiracy disguised as a city.
Umbrella Built This City
Raccoon City looked like your typical mid-sized American town with a university, police department and 100,000 people going about their lives. Umbrella Corporation was a pharmaceutical company with a major presence in the city.
But underneath that normalcy, Raccoon City was actually Umbrella’s laboratory with a human population living on top of it. They had developed a bioweapons program centered on the T-Virus, a mutagenic retroviruses designed to reanimate dead tissue.
At the center of the operation was the Spencer Mansion in the Arklay Mountains. The Victorian-styled estate hid a research facility underneath the mansion, where scientists developed and tested biological weapons. In July 1998, a leak at the lab caused the T-Virus to spread throughout the facility, killing and zombifying staff.
Raccoon City’s elite police team S.T.A.R.S. unit (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) was sent to investigate disappearances and were massacred. Only a handful of officers survived: Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Barry Burton. They found the lab, destroyed it and came back with testimony about what Umbrella had been doing. But nothing happened. Umbrella had too many people in too many places. The testimony was suppressed and Raccoon City went on as normal.
The Outbreak
William Birkin is Umbrella’s star researcher and creator of an even more dangerous version of the T-Virus called the G-Virus.
In September 1998, Umbrella’s agents headed to the Spencer Mansion to retrieve the G-Virus by force for their own purposes.
Feeling betrayed, William injected himself with the G-Virus rather than let them have it Due to the G-Virus triggering constant mutations, he transformed into a monster. His rampage led to another leak of the T-Virus, this time contaminating Raccoon City’s water supply.
It didn’t take long for people to get infected. The RCPD (Raccoon City Police Department) was quickly overwhelmed. Police Chief Brian Irons was on Umbrella’s payroll. As the city fell apart around him, he sabotaged evacuation and rescue efforts to protect the company’s secrets. The military arrived not to help people out, but to set up roadblocks keeping them in. Civilians who made it to the edge of the city, were turned away at gunpoint. The U.S. government had decided that the cover-up was worth more than the lives inside.
Meanwhile, Umbrella deployed Nemesis, an advanced Tyrant bioweapon, capable of thought, adaptation, and wielding weapons. Nemesis had one directive: hunt and kill the surviving S.T.A.R.S. members.
The creatures inside Raccoon City were terrifying. But the real monsters were the ones who saw the residents as something that could be disposed of.
Escaping Raccoon City
In spite of the military’s efforts to eradicate the entire population of Raccoon City, a small number of people were able to escape.
Rookie cop Leon Kennedy, Chris’ sister Claire Redfield, and Birkin’s daughter Sherry escaped through an Umbrella freight rail line running beneath the city. They fought through the RCPD, the sewers, an underground lab, confronted Birkin’s barely-human mutated form, and crawled out of a tunnel outside city limits.
Jill stayed in Raccoon City after the Spencer Mansion incident to gather evidence against Umbrella, which meant she was trapped the moment the city fell. Resident Evil 3 is her fight to get out, through city streets, a clock tower, a hospital, and an Umbrella facility. All with Nemesis always right on her tail. She finally made it out by helicopter, arranged by a mercenary named Carlos Oliveira who came to actually care whether she lived.
The Resident Evil Outbreak games, two PS2 titles from 2003 and 2004, follow ordinary civilians trying to survive the ordeal. We see the outbreak through the eyes of a bartender, a nurse, a college student and a journalist. These people have zero training or special-forces instincts. They’re just trying to get out of a city that had been sealed around them. Not all of them make it. The games are canon, and they matter, because they turn Raccoon City into a real place full of real consequences.
What the Survivors Carry Out With Them
Raccoon City was destroyed by a missile strike in early October 1998. The official story was vague, and Umbrella’s culpability was buried. The government’s role in trapping people inside was never acknowledged. For years, the truth stayed suppressed.
But the survivors couldn’t be suppressed. Leon and Claire became key witnesses in the eventual legal case against Umbrella. The government’s response was to conscript Leon: work for us, or your testimony goes nowhere. He’s been working for them ever since.
Claire spent years fighting bioweapons conspiracies. Jill’s arc in Resident Evil 5 carries the weight of her trauma. Sherry Birkin, the little girl they rescued, was taken into government custody and used as a research subject because of how her body had adapted to the G-Virus. She eventually becomes a government agent herself.
Umbrella was eventually dismantled through legal proceedings and the work of the newly formed BSAA, the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance that grew directly out of the aftermath of Raccoon City’s destruction. Unfortunately, its technology found its way into black markets, and the hands of new opportunists and organizations. This fuels the bioterrorism crises that drive the stories of Resident Evil 4 through Resident Evil 8.
Raccoon City still functions as the gravitational center of the Resident Evil universe. It’s because the series built its moral architecture on top of it. Nearly every disaster can be traced back to the first leak of the T-Virus. The real disaster wasn’t the zombies attacking survivors. It was the actions of the police chief, the government, the military. Every authority that could have intervened at any point in time and chose to protect itself instead. That’s what Jill was watching burn from the helicopter.
