Trivia / Resident Evil 5

• Billing Displacement: Jill replaces Sheva on the cover artwork of the Gold Edition, despite the fact that she's only playable in the two unlockable chapters and doesn't show up in the main campaign until the very end.
• Directed by Cast Member: Liam O'Brien, who voices the minor character Reynard Fisher at the start of the game, is the game's ADR director.
• Fake Nationality: Josh Stone, who speaks with an African accent, is voiced by TJ Storm, an American.
• Meme Role Reprise:
  • D.C. Douglas released a "blooper reel" (actually a parody) of various alternate versions of Albert Wesker's big Large Ham villain speech during the game's climax, which included him bragging about the size of his balls, reaching the Death Star, taking a crack at George W. Bush, and making multiple Freudian slips when he has to deliver the "complete global saturation" line, the last of which causes him to blow up and scream "oh, fuck it, we'll do it live!"
  • Douglas also recorded a Twelve Spoofs of Christmas video in character as Wesker during his final death scene.
• What Could Have Been: Not to the extent of 4, but nevertheless the game underwent a number of changes before release, many which are detailed in The Art of Resident Evil 5:
  • The game was originally designed as a single-player game akin to 4, with Chris as the only playable character. Sheva was originally intended to be a recurring character, being the head of a local militia fighting against the outbreak. When the decision was made to have the game support two-player Co-Op, Sheva was rewritten as a B.S.A.A. operative and Chris' partner.
  • Jill was originally to be found frozen and used by Wesker for research in the TRICELL facility, but it was decided it wasn't interesting enough.
  • Barry Burton was intended to appear multiple times over the course of the game, at one point assisting in a boss fight against no less than ten El Gigantes. He ended up cut from the storyline completely, though he would be a playable character in The Mercenaries Reunion in the Gold Edition.
  • Excella would have simply been a secretary to Tricell, and her death was portrayed very differently (she would've died in the hands of a Tyrant-like creature, literally), and the CEO of Tricell would've been a different, male character. The two characters were ultimately combined in order to create a powerful female villain.
  • A placeholder model for a merchant character was found in the files of the game, suggesting that the Merchant from 4 was intended to return at some point in development. Also found in the game files was a player model version of Ricardo Irving, suggesting he had been intended to be a playable character for The Mercenaries mode.
  • An early Famitsu interview with producer Jun Takeuchi stated that the use of light would be very important in the game. The example given was that if the player character were to move from a bright area to a dark area very quickly, it would take them a few moments to adapt before they could see again, an effect that would also be replicated for the player. The opposite effect of moving into a bright area from a dark one would work similarly. These moments of inability to aim or see would be used to create moments of fear in the game. In the final version, however, these light mechanics seem to have been entirely scrapped.
  • Three bosses were scrapped in development, including a Tyrant of some description which would've served as a late-stage boss and killed Excella Gionne as an Establishing Character Moment. The other two would have been a train-car-eating mass of Uroboros tentacles resembling a huge, multi-limbed slug (possibly an early version of Irving) and an 80+ foot tall Uroboros creature that would've been faced in a multi-stage bossfight, listed in their concept art as "U-11" and "U-9" respectively.

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