Resident Evil – Code: Veronica

Resident Evil – Code: Veronica features survival horror gameplay, similar to previous Resident Evil games. This includes the series' signature controls, interface, puzzles, as well as zombies and monsters to battle. Unlike previous games in the series which used pre-rendered backgrounds, Code: Veronica uses real-time 3D environments. Because of this, the camera is more dynamic than in previous games.

The camera will follow, pan, and zoom as the player navigates their character through the environment, similar to Capcom's own Dino Crisis (1999). The story is told through cinematic CGI sequences and real-time cutscenes.

In December 1998, three months after escaping from Raccoon City (seen in Resident Evil 2) prior to its eventual destruction (seen in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis), Claire Redfield raids an Umbrella Corporation facility in Paris in search of her brother, Chris Redfield. Discovered by Umbrella's security forces and eventually captured, Claire is imprisoned on Rockfort Island, a prison complex owned by the corporation, situated in the Southern Ocean. She is knocked unconscious after arriving. Sometime after her imprisonment, Claire wakes up and finds herself released by the man who captured her, and discovers that an outbreak of the T-virus has occurred. In the resulting chaos, she finds herself teaming up with Steve Burnside, another inmate seeking to escape.

In their repeated efforts to explore the island and find the means to leave, the pair finds themselves confronting the island's commander, Alfred Ashford. Both Claire and Steve find him to be mentally unstable as a result of him switching between two personalities—his own, and that of his twin sister Alexia. Eventually, the pair manages to find a seaplane and use it to escape, only for Alfred to pursue them and switch their plane to autopilot, directing it towards another Umbrella facility in Antarctica. Upon their arrival, the pair finds that this facility had also suffered an outbreak, and fight their way through the zombies and monsters within to seek a means of escape, battling with Alfred and fatally wounding him.

With the success of Resident Evil 2 in 1998, Capcom began more Resident Evil projects across multiple consoles. Code: Veronica originated from an unsuccessful attempt to port Resident Evil 2 to the Sega Saturn. After producer Shinji Mikami and his team learned they would be unable to port Resident Evil 2 without making a large sacrifice to quality, Mikami was asked by his leadership to create something else for Sega fans, and so development began on an original Saturn game. When Mikami asked for more development time, he was told it would need to have a better technical quality, making Sega's upcoming Dreamcast more appealing.

Around the same time development on the Dreamcast game was starting, a side-story game for the PlayStation starring Jill Valentine in the events leading up to Resident Evil 2 was being developed. It was intended to be a spin-off with the more ambitious Dreamcast game as the true sequel, however, the PlayStation game was made a numbered release (Resident Evil 3), and the Dreamcast game was titled Code: Veronica. To what degree Capcom had considered making Code: Veronica a numbered release is not clear. In interviews at the time, producer Shinji Mikami and Flagship president Yoshiki Okamoto told journalists they wanted to keep the numbered chronology on the PlayStation systems, and give subtitles to Resident Evil games on all other systems.

Code: Veronica received universal acclaim; many critics felt it was the best Resident Evil game at the time, and a "must-own" for the Dreamcast. Derek Williams of AllGame called it the best game for the system along with Soulcalibur (1999). A critic from GameRevolution found it to be the best of all the horror games on the Dreamcast, towering the likes of The House of the Dead 2 (1999), Zombie Revenge (1999), and Carrier (2000). Next Generation dubbed it "the best game yet for Dreamcast—in fact, one of the best games we've seen in the past couple of years."

The atmosphere and presentation received praise. Edge called it "the closest the series has got to emulating a Hollywood action feature". Most reviewers found the graphics as being some of the very best on the Dreamcast and being a testament to the power of its hardware. Along with this, critics pointed out Code: Veronica's use of real-time backgrounds and a dynamic camera as an improvement from the pre-rendered backgrounds of previous series entries.

Aaron Boehm of Bloody Disgusting described Code: Veronica as one of the era's most memorable survival horror games. Game Informer ranked Code: Veronica the 69th-best game in 2001, while GamesRadar+ named it the 14th-best Dreamcast game. Code: Veronica is notorious for allowing players to become softlocked.

The Code: Veronica story has been adapted into other works. Resident Evil Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica (2001) for Naomi-based arcades and PlayStation 2 follows the story of Code: Veronica from a first-person view with light gun shooter-style gameplay. Similarly, another light gun game, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles (2009) was released for the Wii and features sequences set in Code: Veronica along with Resident Evil 2. As with previous Resident Evil games, the story was adapted into a novel written by S.