The Buildings That Never Were

Quick Summary

• Returning to the ruined Raccoon City Police Department felt like going back to a place I had known, not replaying an old level.
• I remembered the layout because I had spent hours finding my own way through it.
• Leon, Jill, and now Grace carry those places through time. They have aged alongside me.
• The buildings only exist in my head, but I still know my way around them.

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I walked into a police station that doesn’t exist and knew exactly where to go.

Past the entryway with the empty front desk. Down the hall toward the records room. The path felt familiar, like walking back through my old high school. Some part of my brain had been holding onto the layout without telling me.

This was the Raccoon City Police Department. The RPD. The building that anchors the second Resident Evil game from 1998, its 2019 remake, and the third game from a different angle. And now the ninth, where I’d just walked in for the first time in years.

A cutscene showed the “Welcome Leon” ribbon. The same one his fellow officers had put up for him on his first day at the precinct. Inside the fiction, the ribbon is a taunt — Leon’s antagonist using a fragment of the past against him. I wasn’t who the taunt was for. It caught me anyway.

The studio seemed to know it would.

Why did a fictional building hit me so hard?

The Building Itself

For anyone who hasn’t played the games, the Raccoon City Police Department is the central setting of Resident Evil 2. It is an ornate building with marble staircases, dark wood, locked doors, and rooms full of files. You spend hours inside it.

The game forces a slow, careful kind of movement: zombies in the halls, limited ammo, a map you keep checking.

I didn’t watch the building. I moved through it. I learned which corridors connected, which key opened which door, and which window dropped back into the lobby. By the time I finished, I knew the place the way I know my own kitchen.

The same building returns in Resident Evil 3 from another angle, in spin-offs and remakes, and now in Resident Evil 9. Each time, the studio assumes you remember.

What I Recognized

The street outside came back first. In Resident Evil 2 and 3, the approach to the RPD was full of zombies and cars blocking the way.

Resident Evil 9 brings you back to that same approach. The cars are in the same spots. I recognized geography that doesn’t exist.

Then I reached the building itself. Years have passed in the fiction, and the place is in ruins: offices wrecked, ceilings down, blood where there wasn’t blood before.

But the map I’d built as a kid playing the original Resident Evil 3 still worked. The locked door I expected to find a key for was still locked. The ruin didn’t erase the layout, it sat on top of it.

I also expected to see people I remembered.

I moved through the corridors hoping for familiar faces, and dreading a few of them. I expected Chief Irons, or Kendo and his daughter from the second game’s gun shop. None of them appear.

The entire RPD holds one officer zombie and Mr X.

I didn’t expect Mr X back, but the moment I saw him, I knew what he could do. I ran.

The Orphanage

In Resident Evil 2 there’s an orphanage. You pass through it briefly: party bunting strung across the ceiling, children’s drawings on the wall, a play mat on the floor. The colors are warm. A missing child is hiding somewhere inside.

You spend the segment trying to reach her. It is the kind of place a horror game uses to make you feel something fast.

Resident Evil 9 reaches back into that memory and changes it.

The orphanage was a front. The same playroom I walked through, with the bunting still hanging and the drawings still pinned to the wall, covered up experiments on the children who lived there.

And then Resident Evil 9 puts you in that same playroom. You play as Chloe, one of the experimented children.

The bunting is the same. The drawings are the same. The play mat is in the same place.

You’re not trying to reach a missing child anymore. You’re the child. The part of the story I didn’t see in the original game is the part I live through this time.

The segment is a flashback. Chloe is gone by the time the game’s present begins, so the room is also a memory of a girl who isn’t there anymore.

The room I remembered as sad turned out to be much worse. I wasn’t passing through it this time. I was standing in it as one of the children.

The studio rewrote a building I already knew and cast me in a role I hadn’t seen. Now I can’t remember the original playroom without thinking of what happened there.

The People I Remember

The franchise also carries its characters forward, and they age.

Leon was new in 1998. A young officer fresh out of training, in over his head in a city overrun by zombies.

He came back in RE4 a few years older, still scrambling. More games followed, each marking the time. In Resident Evil 9 he’s visibly older, and so am I.

A game series that returns every three or four years can let a character age alongside me for decades.

My own order runs Jill first, as a kid playing the original Resident Evil 3. Then Leon, years later, in the RE2 remake. Then Ada, returning in RE4. Each one is tied to a phase of my life as much as to the franchise. The order I met them tells me who I was when I met them.

And then Resident Evil 9 introduces Grace. A new main character alongside Leon, an FBI technical analyst sent to investigate a string of deaths in a small town.

She’s anxious and out of her depth, as I would be if a quick investigation turned into a bioweapons lab. She feels believable, at least by the standards of a world full of zombies.

I don’t know if she’ll be back. I already want to see her in the next game, and I’m already wondering whether she’ll still be alive.

The Crossover

My attachment to the RPD followed me outside Resident Evil.

Dead by Daylight is a multiplayer horror game made by a different studio. It has its own world, its own mechanics, its own players. And it has the RPD as a map.

You drop into Dead by Daylight’s RPD as a Survivor. The lobby is the lobby. The east office is the east office. The staircase to the second floor is exactly where you remember it. Different game, different studio, and the layout sits on top of the memory I already had.

Leon and Jill are playable Survivors. Wesker and Nemesis are Killers. The crossover works because the players walking into that map already know how the building flows.

Resident Evil 9 does something similar with files explaining what lickers are: long-tongued bioweapons that cannot see and hunt by sound. A new player needs those files. I didn’t. I had learned by listening for them in the dark.

For thirty years, the franchise has rewarded memories like mine. Sometimes they come back through a file. Sometimes a different studio rebuilds the same hallway, and I walk through it as if I live there.

“It’s Just a Game”

I’ve heard people say, “It’s just a game. Get over it.” I’ve said it to myself too, but it doesn’t explain what happened when I returned to the RPD.

I hadn’t watched someone else walk through this place. I had chosen every corridor and tried every door. A film’s camera shows me a space, but a game makes me find my own way around it.

Years later, returning to the RPD felt less like revisiting a set and more like going somewhere I had been.

There’s a harder question underneath. Is this a healthy sort of memory to keep, or is it wasted emotional bandwidth?

I have an unusual answer to that one. I process emotions differently: combined ADHD, low empathy. I often understand that something matters without feeling it myself, and I’ve written about that in Learning to Care Without Feeling It.

When I walked back into the RPD, I felt something I hadn’t felt in twenty-odd years. That a place I’d never visited could reach me when most real things don’t was enough. I stopped worrying about whether the memory deserved the space it took up.

Why the Memory Stayed

I have carried this map through multiple games, consoles, and phases of my life. I can still find the records room with my eyes closed. It is the same reason games taught me things I could not learn from a management book.

Sometimes another studio borrowed the floor plan. Sometimes the building came back in ruins or with a story I hadn’t known. The map held either way.

I used to call that escapism, but an escape ends when I return to my life. This memory stayed with me through most of mine.

I no longer think a memory needs a physical place behind it. I can know my way around somewhere I’ve never been and grieve what happened in a hallway that doesn’t exist.

What I Kept

I still know which hallway leads to the records room. I’ll probably know it for the rest of my life.

That used to feel like a waste of space. Now I’m glad some part of me decided it was worth keeping.