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The Resident Evil franchise is no stranger to its fair share of odd entries and multiple ports from time to time, from the spin off titles like The Mercenaries 3D, Operation: Raccoon City and Resident Evil Resistance, to their more obscure and weird entries to forgotten devices, like the mobile port of Resident Evil 4 in 2008 (appearing also on the iPhone in 2009) and its follow up mobile game based on the CGI movie of the time, Resident Evil: Degeneration in 2009.

Unlike the spin off titles, which tend to be released on main consoles and/or PC, the mobile ports are a whole different story, since they used to run not only in niche devices from decades ago, but they usually ran on certain subscription services and internet connectivity for the mobile devices, which was something not frequently seen in mobile devices at the time.

All of these details add up, making a vast majority of these games from the 2000s and early 2010s released on mobile from a wide variety of franchises to be specially hard to come by nowadays, more so since most of the phones have been ditches already in favour of more modern touch-screen based devices with current standardized operating systems. Only those users that still maintain their mobile phones from more than 10 years ago in a fully functional state, and also with their memory intact, are the only ones that could help to preserve all of the lost media from this specific age of gaming.

This is where Twitter user RockmanCosmo, with the help from m3M0ryHuN73R and usernameak, jumps in. In a collaborative effort and utilizing special debugging cables and tools like the Xyz's ktdumper script, they managed to successfully dump and preserve a demo of one of the Resident Evil mobile titles, this one being "Resident Evil: The Stories", which is a Mercenaries-like game set on the original Resident Evil 3's settings and timeline, seeing Jill traversing different sections from the PSX classic, like the Clock Tower, killing zombies and other B.O.W.s to gather points and getting a rank based on the performance. The free demo has a time limit, while the full game requires an internet connection.

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"Resident Evil: The Stories" was part of multiple Mercenaries-based titles released on mobiles back in the mid 2000s, with the others being "Resident Evil: The Missions", "Resident Evil: The Episodes" and "Resident Evil: The Operations", all of which follow a similar gameplay format. These are far from being the only Resident Evil titles that saw the light of day in mobile devices back then, as there's also the aforementioned Resident Evil 4 port and also the Resident Evil: Degeneration mobile game, to name a few.

Thanks to their efforts, yet another title thought to be lost to time now has a change to be achieved and preserved for times to come, and one can only hope that more titles from this mostly neglected age of gaming can get their spotlight in the gaming archives for other generations.

 

[ShadowOne333]

Uh, so the full game is lost forever cause it requires to connect to a server that no longer exists?

While the demo will probably get cracked to remove the time limit if that's the only difference with the full game.

If the games got cracked, then most likely the internet connection might be up next.
Although if the full game was server side, then yeah it'd be lost, but I doubt that'd be the case for mobile games from the 2000s.

 

[memoryhunter]

Uh, so the full game is lost forever cause it requires to connect to a server that no longer exists?

While the demo will probably get cracked to remove the time limit if that's the only difference with the full game.

Yeah, that's most likely doable

 

[TheZander]

Finally after all these years P9030i encryption has been cracked.

It's cool seeing people interested in this, i find it hard to fathom anybody would do anything with this. But Twitter comments on the post have the people with the same "cant wait to dig into these assets" comments. I

 

[spotanjo3]

What about Ninja Gaiden X prequel from Tecmo ? It was never dumped and preserved anyway.