Presentation
An uppercut that almost forces you to shout its name.
A blue robot who steals the powers of his enemies.
A mansion where every door seems to have something personal against you.
A sword that is far too large.
A lawyer who can turn a finger pointed at a witness into a dramatic event.
Then a thirty-meter dragon whose habits you have to learn before realizing that your first idea — running straight at it while attacking — may have been slightly optimistic.
Street Fighter.
Mega Man.
Resident Evil.
Devil May Cry.
Ace Attorney.
Monster Hunter.
Behind these extremely different games stands Capcom.
A Japanese company founded in Osaka in 1983, whose story began in arcades before crossing almost every major transformation of modern video games.
Capcom develops and publishes its own games.
But reducing it to a simple studio would be misleading.
The company also operates arcade facilities, amusement equipment activities and its intellectual properties across film, animation, merchandise, events, esports and various collaborations.
What truly connects all of this is therefore not a genre.
Capcom can make a fighting game.
A survival horror game.
An action RPG.
A spectacular action game.
A courtroom investigation driven almost entirely by dialogue.
And yet something keeps returning.
The game has to make sense through your hands.
Positioning.
Timing.
Dodging.
Reading the opponent.
Gradually mastering a system.
Capcom obviously tells stories.
But a large part of its identity was built around a more elementary idea:
before the player remembers the story, they should want to pick up the controller again.
History
1979-1983: before Capcom
The story begins a few years before Capcom’s official creation.
In 1979, I.R.M. Corporation was founded in Matsubara, Osaka Prefecture, to develop and sell electronic game machines.
In 1981, Japan Capsule Computer Co., Ltd. also appeared.
Then, in June 1983, the first Capcom Co., Ltd. was established in Osaka to sell software.
Capcom considers 1983 its official founding year.
The name itself comes from the expression:
Capsule Computer.
The idea of the capsule referred to something compact, protected and filled with entertainment.
A fairly appropriate image, in the end, for a company that would spend the following decades trying to compress a great deal of gameplay into a few buttons.
1984: the arcade as a school
In 1984, Capcom released its first internally developed arcade video game:
Vulgus.
1942 arrived the same year.
Then came Commando and Ghosts’n Goblins in 1985.
At the time, the arcade was a particularly brutal school.
A game had to be understood quickly.
It had to catch the eye.
Respond immediately to inputs.
Create challenge.
Then make the player want to insert another coin.
Capcom therefore developed a gameplay culture very early on, built around readability and response.
That origin would remain visible long after arcades stopped being the center of the market.
A good Capcom game generally does not need fifty minutes before its systems start speaking.
The character moves.
The player acts.
The game responds.
The conversation has already begun.
1987: Mega Man and Street Fighter
The year 1987 saw the arrival of two series that would become iconic.
In August, Capcom launched the first Street Fighter in arcades.
In December, Mega Man arrived on NES.
The two games followed different paths.
Mega Man built its identity around platforming, shooting and an idea that became fundamental to the series:
defeating a boss allows you to take its power.
Progression therefore becomes a strategic choice.
Which boss should you fight first?
Which weapon works against which enemy?
Which order makes the adventure easier?
The player does not progress only because the character becomes stronger.
They progress because they understand the system better.
Street Fighter still had a much larger revolution ahead of it.
That came a few years later.
1991: Street Fighter II changes the arcade
In 1991, Capcom released Street Fighter II.
The result went far beyond the success of a simple sequel.
Multiple characters.
Different fighting styles.
Direct competition between players.
Enough depth to be enjoyable quickly, yet enough complexity to support years of improvement.
The game became a worldwide phenomenon.
Something changed around arcade cabinets.
The player was no longer simply trying to beat the machine.
They were trying to beat the person standing next to them.
Versus fighting found one of its foundational forms.
Capcom understood something that would keep returning throughout its history:
a game system can become a social language.
You learn the moves.
Watch the opponent.
Master your character.
Develop habits.
Then someone else learns how to punish them.
Thirty-five years later, Street Fighter 6 is still essentially continuing the same conversation.
The graphics have changed.
Online play has replaced part of the arcade experience.
But two players are still trying to read what the other is thinking before the other realizes it themselves.
1996: Resident Evil opens another door
In March 1996, Capcom released Resident Evil on PlayStation.
In Japan, the series is called Biohazard.
The change was dramatic.
Capcom was already strongly associated with action.
Resident Evil sometimes asked the player to do exactly the opposite.
Slow down.
Observe.
Conserve.
Decide whether that enemy really deserves a bullet.
Wonder whether opening that door right now was actually a good idea.
The game helped establish and popularize survival horror.
The horror did not come only from what you could see.
It came from what you had.
Three herbs.
A few bullets.
An inventory that was too small.
And far too many corridors.
Resident Evil revealed another side of Capcom’s expertise.
Creating tension does not necessarily mean taking control away from the player.
It can instead mean giving them just enough control to understand all the bad things that could happen.
Resident Evil learns to mutate early
What makes the series particularly interesting is how quickly it refuses to remain trapped inside its own formula.
The early games establish the foundations.
Exploration.
Resource management.
Puzzles.
Fixed cameras.
Then Resident Evil 4, in 2005, profoundly changes the rhythm and presentation of the series.
The camera moves behind the character.
The action becomes more direct.
Combat takes a much larger role.
Resident Evil changes.
And, paradoxically, goes on to influence a huge number of action games that are not horror games at all.
A few years later, the series will change again.
Then again.
This willingness to partially destroy a successful formula in order to build another becomes one of Capcom’s most important traits.
2001: three games, three new directions
The beginning of the 2000s shows Capcom’s ability to multiply identities particularly well.
In 2001, the company notably released:
Onimusha.
Devil May Cry.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
Three games that are difficult to confuse.
Onimusha mixes action, feudal Japan and supernatural elements.
Devil May Cry pushes combat toward spectacular action where winning is not always enough.
You have to win with style.
Phoenix Wright turns investigations, testimony and courtroom trials into a form of adventure game where contradiction becomes almost a special attack.
This diversity matters.
Capcom is not simply trying to reproduce Street Fighter or Resident Evil.
The company continues creating new ideas even after already establishing several major franchises.
And some of those ideas will themselves become series lasting for decades.
Devil May Cry: winning is not enough
With Devil May Cry, Capcom gradually formalizes a particularly interesting idea in action games.
The player can defeat their enemies.
But the game can also ask:
how did you defeat them?
Variety.
Timing.
Combos.
Risk-taking.
Control.
Style.
Pure efficiency is no longer always the only objective.
Performance becomes expressive.
That idea would have a lasting influence on an entire branch of action games.
The player no longer masters a system simply to survive.
They learn to use it well enough to begin playing with it.
Ace Attorney: gameplay can also fit inside a sentence
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Ace Attorney seems almost to contradict Capcom’s entire arcade history.
Lots of text.
Investigations.
Testimonies.
Very little reflex-based action.
And yet the logic is surprisingly similar.
Observe.
Identify a behavior.
Find a weakness.
Choose the right moment.
Then attack.
Except this time, the weapon is evidence.
And the projectile is:
“Objection!”
Ace Attorney shows that Capcom’s culture of systems does not necessarily mean speed or action.
It can also become an intellectual mechanic that is extremely easy to understand and immediately recognizable.
2004: Monster Hunter begins slowly
In 2004, Capcom launched Monster Hunter.
The principle seems straightforward.
Hunt gigantic creatures.
Collect their materials.
Craft better equipment.
Then go hunt something even more dangerous.
But beneath that loop lies a far more demanding system.
Every weapon has its own rhythm.
Every monster its own behavior.
Every fight demands observation, preparation and adaptation.
At first, Monster Hunter was not yet the worldwide phenomenon it would become.
The series found particularly fertile ground on portable consoles in Japan.
With Monster Hunter Freedom 2, followed by later entries, players physically gathered together to hunt.
The game became a social experience.
People stopped simply asking:
“How far are you in the game?”
They started asking:
“Want to do a quest?”
Monster Hunter: learn before you dominate
Monster Hunter may represent one of Capcom’s purest philosophies.
At first, many things can feel heavy.
Animations commit the character.
Monsters do not have a simple health bar floating peacefully above their heads.
Weapons can feel slow.
A beginner may think the game lacks responsiveness.
Then something changes.
They understand.
Slowness becomes commitment.
Animation becomes information.
The monster’s behavior becomes language.
Preparation becomes strategy.
The same system that once felt restrictive begins to offer remarkable precision.
The character has not necessarily become much stronger. The player has.
That idea runs through a great many Capcom games.
2006: aiming more directly at the global market
With the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation, Capcom developed several new franchises designed for an international market.
Dead Rising arrived in 2006 on Xbox 360.
The same year brought Lost Planet.
Both passed one million copies sold.
Dead Rising turned a shopping mall filled with zombies into a gigantic playground for experimentation.
Almost anything could become a weapon.
The game mixed horror, absurdity, time pressure and freedom.
Lost Planet aimed more directly at spectacular action and science fiction.
This period shows a Capcom actively trying to understand a market that had become far more global.
Not every experiment from that era produced franchises as durable as Resident Evil or Monster Hunter.
But they contributed to an essential transformation:
Capcom could no longer think only from Japan toward the rest of the world.
The entire world became directly part of its market.
The 2010s: owning major franchises is not enough
By the beginning of the 2010s, Capcom already possessed an impressive catalogue.
But a famous franchise guarantees nothing.
Tastes change.
Development costs increase.
Platforms multiply.
Digital distribution gradually transforms the way games are sold.
The question becomes:
how do you run a company built around hits in an industry where every hit becomes more expensive to make?
Capcom gradually answers through two connected transformations.
A technological transformation.
And a commercial one.
The first is called RE ENGINE.
The second consists of treating older games not as finished products, but as a catalogue capable of remaining alive for years.
2017: Resident Evil 7 and RE ENGINE
In 2017, Capcom released Resident Evil 7 biohazard.
The game marked another rupture.
A switch to first person.
A return to much more intimate horror.
A new family.
A new house.
A new way of framing fear.
But behind this visible transformation was something fundamental to the entire company:
RE ENGINE.
Capcom developed the engine internally in close collaboration with the Resident Evil 7 team.
Its purpose was not simply to create prettier graphics.
It also had to improve the way games were made.
Rendering.
Animation.
Tools.
Testing.
Multiplatform development.
Quality control.
The engine gradually became a shared infrastructure across the company.
Resident Evil.
Devil May Cry.
Street Fighter.
Monster Hunter.
Visually and mechanically very different games could now share a significant part of their technology.
By 2026, Capcom states that all of its current titles are being developed with RE ENGINE.
That is a considerable change.
The engine does not impose the appearance of the games.
It gives them a common foundation that allows them to remain different.
2018: Monster Hunter becomes truly global
In 2018, Capcom launched Monster Hunter: World.
The series was already enormous in Japan.
But this installment changed its international scale.
Simultaneous worldwide release.
Twelve languages.
A production designed for high-end consoles.
International communication.
A clear intention to remove some of the barriers that had made the series difficult for new audiences to approach.
The result exceeded expectations.
Monster Hunter: World became the first game in Capcom’s history to surpass 10 million copies.
It would continue selling for years afterward.
The success reveals something essential.
Capcom did not make Monster Hunter globally popular by removing everything that made Monster Hunter what it was.
It mainly worked to make that complexity more accessible without making it meaningless.
That is a huge difference.
Resident Evil 2: remake without merely reproducing
In 2019, Capcom released the remake of Resident Evil 2.
The project could have simply reproduced the 1998 classic with modern technology.
It chose another path.
Camera.
Movement.
Combat.
Presentation.
Environments.
Enemy behavior.
A large part of the game is rebuilt.
And yet the identity of the Raccoon City Police Department remains immediately recognizable.
The project becomes an interesting model for future Capcom remakes.
Preserve the memory without preserving every technical limitation that originally produced that memory.
Resident Evil 3 and later Resident Evil 4 would follow this logic in their own ways.
Capcom discovers that an old game can become more than a simple rerelease.
It can become a creative project again.
The catalogue stops being the past
At the same time, the company gradually transforms its commercial strategy.
The growth of digital sales allows older games to remain available much longer.
A Resident Evil game released several years earlier can still find new players.
A Devil May Cry title can benefit from an animated adaptation and regain visibility.
A Street Fighter game can continue attracting players through tournaments, discounts or a new platform.
Capcom therefore no longer measures performance only through newly released games.
Catalogue titles — games already on the market — become a fundamental part of the business model.
It is a small revolution.
In the old physical model:
a game launches.
Occupies shelf space.
Then gradually disappears.
In the digital model:
a game can continue existing.
Go on sale.
Change price.
Reach another platform.
Be rediscovered through another installment.
And continue selling ten years later.
The catalogue becomes an active library.
2023: Street Fighter returns to the center of the ring
With Street Fighter 6, released in 2023, Capcom applies a similar logic to its historic fighting franchise.
The game needs to speak to competitive players.
But also to someone discovering the genre for the first time.
Modern Controls reduce certain barriers.
World Tour adds a different form of progression beyond traditional versus fighting.
Battle Hub turns part of the experience into a social space.
And the competitive core remains intact.
Once again, Capcom does not modernize by removing depth.
It instead tries to create several doors into the same building.
One for the beginner.
One for someone who simply wants to have fun.
One for the player counting frames.
Everyone can enter.
They simply will not all visit the same floors.
2025: Monster Hunter Wilds changes scale again
In February 2025, Capcom released Monster Hunter Wilds.
The game surpassed 8 million copies in three days, then 10 million during its first month, setting new sales-speed records for the company.
The most interesting part is not only the number.
It is the path taken.
A series that originally built much of its phenomenon around Japanese players gathering together with their PSPs became a global franchise capable of producing one of the biggest launches in Capcom’s history.
Monster Hunter has not changed its subject.
You still hunt monsters.
Still craft equipment.
Still learn weapons.
But the scale surrounding that loop has completely changed.
2026: Resident Evil keeps mutating
In February 2026, Capcom released Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth main installment in the series.
Thirty years after the first Resident Evil, the franchise remains one of the company’s main engines.
And its longevity almost tells Capcom’s entire philosophy by itself.
A series can change:
camera;
rhythm;
character;
structure;
technology;
level of action;
without necessarily losing its identity.
Resident Evil did not survive because Capcom found a formula in 1996 and decided never to touch it again.
It survived because the company repeatedly accepted the risk of putting that formula in danger.
Taking games beyond the screen
Capcom does not limit its franchises to video games either.
This strategy even has an internal name:
Single Content Multiple Usage.
One universe can become:
a film;
an animated series;
merchandise;
an event;
an attraction;
an esports competition;
a collaboration;
a stage production.
Resident Evil has a long history of film and animation adaptations.
Ace Attorney has been adapted into film, anime and stage productions.
Sengoku BASARA has crossed into animation, theatre and cultural collaborations.
Monster Hunter exists through merchandise, events and adaptations.
Street Fighter fuels competitions, cinema and merchandising.
In 2022, Capcom even established Capcom Pictures in the United States.
The game generally remains the core.
But a successful intellectual property can now live far beyond it.
What sets it apart
Gameplay before scenery
Capcom owns memorable worlds.
Raccoon City.
Monster Hunter’s hunting grounds.
Street Fighter’s fighters.
Devil May Cry’s demons.
But the memory of a Capcom game very often begins with a sensation.
The precise moment an attack connects.
The sound of a parry.
The window of a dodge.
The weight of a great sword.
The distance between two fighters.
The time required to reload while something moves toward you.
The game is designed as a conversation between:
player action → system response → new decision.
That loop is so fundamental that it survives across completely different genres.
Street Fighter and Resident Evil play nothing alike.
But both ask the player to carefully observe what the game is doing before deciding what to do next.
Making the player learn, not merely progress
Many games reward players with statistics.
Capcom obviously uses that kind of progression too.
But several of its series give particular importance to another kind of progression:
the one that happens inside the player’s head and hands.
A new Monster Hunter player can hold the same weapon as a veteran.
They do not use it the same way.
A Street Fighter beginner can select the same Ryu as a professional.
It is clearly not the same Ryu.
In Resident Evil, knowing the layout of an area immediately changes the way you move through it.
In Devil May Cry, a mechanic first used simply to survive gradually becomes a tool for expression.
Mastery is therefore not represented only by a number.
It becomes visible in the way the player plays.
Reinvent without starting from zero
Capcom now owns several franchises that are twenty, thirty or almost forty years old.
The problem is obvious.
How do you continue?
The safest solution would be repetition.
The most spectacular would be changing everything.
Capcom often navigates between the two.
Resident Evil 7 changes perspective while returning to horror.
Resident Evil 2 rebuilds a classic without simply reproducing it.
Monster Hunter: World opens the series to a global audience without stripping away the depth of its hunts.
Street Fighter 6 creates new entry points without abandoning its competitive core.
The right question is therefore not:
“What exactly must be preserved?”
It is closer to:
“Which feeling absolutely has to survive?”
Once that answer is found, many other things can change.
RE ENGINE: shared technology without a shared aesthetic
You only need to look at the games using RE ENGINE to understand the system’s value.
Resident Evil can aim for photorealism and horror.
Street Fighter 6 can pursue stylized bodies, vivid colors and almost graphic effects.
Monster Hunter can build vast environments filled with creatures.
Kunitsu-Gami can develop a completely different visual identity.
The engine does not try to turn every production into a demonstration of the same technology.
Its role is more about giving teams a common language.
Tools.
Rendering.
Testing.
Multiplatform development.
Production.
Quality.
Capcom now states that RE ENGINE is used for all of its titles.
The engine is shared. The games do not have to be.
That is probably the best way to understand its importance.
An old game is not a dead product
Capcom’s modern digital strategy is another important characteristic.
The company actively exploits its catalogue.
Discounts.
New platforms.
Remasters.
Collections.
Remakes.
Adaptations.
Franchise-related events.
The release of a new installment can revive sales of older ones.
An animated series can bring new players to a game released several years earlier.
Digital distribution changes the value of time.
A five-year-old game is no longer automatically an old product.
It can become:
the cheapest entry point into a franchise that has just regained public attention.
That logic explains a significant part of Capcom’s recent stability.
The company no longer depends entirely on its next enormous launch.
It has several decades of games capable of continuing to work.
IP that can change medium
Capcom has been extending its franchises beyond games for a long time.
The Street Fighter film arrived as early as 1994.
Resident Evil became an international film franchise.
Mega Man moved into animation.
Ace Attorney into cinema, anime and theatre.
Monster Hunter into film, animation and countless collaborations.
This strategy is not new.
What has changed is its organization.
Capcom now explicitly treats intellectual properties as assets capable of circulating across different media.
But one distinction remains important.
The game generally remains the place where the identity is created.
Other media extend it.
They do not replace it.
A company that sometimes knows how to let things sleep
Capcom also owns something that regularly fuels discussions among players:
a rather prestigious graveyard.
Dino Crisis.
Breath of Fire.
Viewtiful Joe.
Certain periods of Onimusha.
Certain branches of Mega Man.
Other franchises return after long absences.
That situation can be frustrating.
But it also reveals a relatively pragmatic approach to the catalogue.
Not every franchise necessarily needs a new entry every year.
Some remain quiet.
Then a remaster appears.
A collection.
A remake.
A new project.
Capcom’s heritage sometimes works like a reserve.
You never quite know which door the company will decide to reopen.
And that is also part of what makes its catalogue fascinating.
An identity far more coherent than it looks
Resident Evil.
Street Fighter.
Monster Hunter.
Ace Attorney.
Devil May Cry.
Mega Man.
In screenshots, almost nothing connects them.
Yet when you play them, a common logic appears.
Understandable rules.
Precise feedback.
Gradual learning.
A real difference between using a system and mastering it.
That may ultimately be Capcom’s deepest identity.
Not a character.
Not a genre.
Not even an engine.
But this very old idea inherited from the arcade:
a game becomes interesting when it makes you want to perform the exact same action again — only a little better.
Good to know
- Capcom considers 1983 its official founding year. Its roots nevertheless go back to I.R.M. Corporation, created in Osaka in 1979 to develop and sell electronic game machines.
- An initial Capcom Co., Ltd. was established in June 1983 to sell software. In 1989, that company was merged with Sanbi, which then adopted the name Capcom Co., Ltd.
- The name Capcom comes from “Capsule Computer.” The idea of the capsule notably referred to entertainment content being contained and protected from copying.
- Capcom is classified here as
entrepriserather thanstudio_jeu, because the group operates across several businesses: digital game development and sales, arcade facilities, amusement equipment and intellectual property exploitation in other sectors. - Capcom is historically connected to Osaka, where the company was founded and where its headquarters and a major part of its development operations remain located.
- Vulgus, released in 1984, was Capcom’s first internally developed arcade video game.
- Street Fighter and Mega Man both appeared in 1987. Street Fighter II later became a major arcade phenomenon in 1991.
- Resident Evil was released on PlayStation in 1996 and helped establish survival horror as a major video game genre.
- Onimusha, Devil May Cry and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney all appeared in the early 2000s, illustrating a particularly important period of new franchise creation.
- The first Monster Hunter was released in 2004. The series initially became an especially strong social phenomenon on Japanese portable consoles before greatly expanding its international audience.
- Monster Hunter: World, released in 2018, was the first Capcom game to surpass 10 million copies sold. Its simultaneous worldwide release and availability in twelve languages directly contributed to the globalization of the franchise.
- RE ENGINE was developed internally during production of Resident Evil 7 biohazard. In 2026, Capcom states that it now uses the engine for all of its titles.
- Capcom officially operates a strategy called “Single Content Multiple Usage”, which consists of exploiting its intellectual properties beyond games through merchandising, film and other activities.
- Capcom Pictures was established in the United States in 2022, strengthening the group’s organization around audiovisual adaptations of its intellectual properties.
- As of June 30, 2026, Resident Evil had surpassed 213 million units sold, making it Capcom’s largest series by cumulative volume.
- At the same date, Monster Hunter had reached 131 million units, Street Fighter 60 million, Mega Man 45 million, Devil May Cry 41 million and Ace Attorney 15 million.
- Monster Hunter Wilds, released in February 2025, surpassed 10 million copies during its first month on sale.
- Resident Evil Requiem was released on February 27, 2026, continuing Capcom’s main horror series thirty years after the original Resident Evil.
- Capcom’s modern strategy places major importance on digital sales and catalogue titles, allowing older games to continue generating sales long after their initial release.