Everywhere we walk through is haunted or will never be haunted, those are the distinctions. The old brick buildings can be spaces for something new. Straight lines and assembled windows, they might stay empty.
Something in my head knows it’s just about time for another Resident Evil. Surrounded by wingnut republicans and apocalypse fetishists who need firearms to protect toilet paper and hand sanitizer. The kind of desperate people incapable of helping eachother.
I hope we can depend on community in times like this. Maybe one day, a good community will rise up out of the ground. It could after all be something simpler, maybe having to do with the fact that Resident Evil 3 has a currently available demo. We’re all surrounded by lede’s about how the world was ending, so maybe not a good choice.

In truth I can seldom think of Metropolitanism without thinking of Raccoon City. It stands as a sole difference from the many west coast cities of videogames, and in defiance of the east coast playgrounds. One of the few places that is not a playground. I have been inside of Raccoon City: seen its bars and taverns. Rolling hills and forests, mountain vacation homes populated by bizarre treasures. The circumstances of my life in Raccoon City all involve violence and survival. During all of that: it was always important to take a minute to appreciate. A rare city built into it’s own history. Modeled after places on the far east coast and in the midwest like Minneapolis. Network mazes of brickwork and repurposed buildings. Old waterways and sewers that tie everything together.

If it were real, not immediately consumed in a horrifying pandemic – there would be a dozen articles in The New Yorker about Raccoon City’s gentrification. About how they ‘kept the city alive’ when the old Downtown Art Museum when was converted to a Police Station. That was how things used to be, but now Umbrella wants to turn the old underground tram into a laboratory. They’d pay for it with taxpayer dollars and put a huge pharmaceutical building somewhere. Sure, the apartments Umbrella builds would require a Butterfly Brooch key you could only get at 12pm in another building to enter: but the investment class would love them all the same.

Racoon City always kept that duality, one the first Resident Evil has it in spades. Industrial laboratories that sleep beneath the skin of rustic mansions like their own kind of virus. They always hold the worst horrors. Experiments that are never meant to see the light of day. As well as the bizarre displays of animal cruelty, there’s the hint of exploited laborers and abused rank-and-file. Later games in the series would always lose that aspect: They traded living cities for the inherent spookiness of haunted castles and an othering of non-western plight.

We can go back to the Mansion, but the best example will always be The Racoon Police Department. A place of almost sublime beauty, smashed into a world of desktop PC’s and office labor. Even if not for its halls that would come to be populated by the living dead, it’s easy to imagine it as still haunted. Decades old art still hangs on the walls. Entire rooms once home to displays of art, now just discarded storage and noteboards. Here I imagine there was once hallways lined with paintings and cult artifacts of local culture. Now they’re just another place someone walks through on their way to another meeting. The past in these places always finds little ways of staying alive. Statues that are too expensive to move. Old libraries that can serve as new places of holding records. Purpose built to house a museum – but I still imagine fine existing as something else.

Elsewhere. Below the streets of Raccoon City, there are the purpose built industrial laboratories and pharmaceutical companies. They’re maze like structures of metal and that foam ceiling that every highschool in America has. These places are all built to serve a function: ID card entry and properly designated break rooms. If it doesn’t sound like a nightmare, it probably should. That’s before they’re filled with biological terror, too.

These places are built to only serve today’s function. The hotels and convenience stores and craft pop-up restaurants. Strip malls and barcades. Have we traded stone for steel and sensibility for luxury? We’re living in an America built on top of the bones of a previous one. Can a new generation sustain themselves on giant corpse-houses made for single families and nothing else?

Sometimes it feels like Raccoon City is more real than ever: We watch our cities and neighborhoods be consumed by corporate investment and restaurateurs from New York. It’s not Umbrella but our faceless corporations are the same: and they’re all telling us what they’ve got to sell is good for us.

On the dawn of Resident Evil 3’s release I’ve been pouring over trailers. It’s not just a remake of a game that took place in the 90’s – it’s a game from a time when cannibalizing our cities wasn’t so ubiquitous. Wandering through the streets of Raccoon City might let us look back into the past – when we built places we knew we would haunt long after we were gone.

But that’s the difference isn’t it? It seems like so much of metropolitan living now is only made for here, this present moment. Those Styrofoam ceilings and stucco that starts peeling five years in. If it’s not solid grey concrete and metal. Giant open air structures that can never be anything other than what they are. The anxiety of tourism cities, built in a way that nobody ever needs to get to know them. Maybe it’s cheap, maybe it’s what people want.

There’s an appeal to haunted places that has a way of sticking with us. We can dress up old places in wood and iron and red bricks, but maybe it’s not all the same. We can’t rebuilt the past – not every city can have a giant museum to turn into an undead infested police station.

Marching forward into the future, I don’t want to be stuck as someone else’s zombie. The truth of all of these places is that the Racoon Police Department was really only ever made to be filled with the ravenous dead. Raccoon City itself, only made to be destroyed.

It will be interesting to return to a series made at a time when living in the city wasn’t yet a fetish ritual for the rich and well off. Resident Evil 3 offers the strangest glimpse into a time just before widespread urban development.

But, I’ll ask no matter if you play these strange video games* or not, to think of what kind of history will be haunting the places we frequent long after we’re gone. Do we invest in houses and buildings that stand the test of time, and give shelter to people long after us? Or is it more important to enjoy the here and now for only what it is.

We are all eventually a Zombie for someone else.