Rumour: Resident Evil 5 shipping in February 2007?

[Revan]

There's no question Resident Evil 4 was one of the top games of 2005. AIAS-award snubs aside, Capcom's survival horror sequel earned accolades from almost every game publication and Web site and was named GameSpot's own Game of the Year 2005 by both editors and readers. It sold solidly on both the GameCube and PlayStation 2, bringing in around $45 million in revenue to date, and is in the process of being ported to the PC. It is also being released at a $19.99 budget price point as part of the GameCube's Player's Choice program.

With interest in the once-flagging Resident Evil series rekindled, gamers are eagerly anticipating the next installment in the series, Resident Evil 5 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A teaser trailer for the game wowed the crowd at last September's 2005 Tokyo Game Show with its lifelike re-creation of a lone hero pursued by undead assailants. Even though it likely won't be released until 2007, interest in the game remains high, and it is currently the eighth-most-trafficked title.

So when agitated gamers noticed that a countdown clock had appeared on the official RE4 site, it appeared that maybe the first clue to Resident Evil 5's release had emerged. Right there on the splash page,underneath the word "enter," were the words "Evil evolves in -" just before a countdow n clock. Since the clock was set to end on February 25, 2007, it seemed perfectly reasonable that it was teasing gamers with the release date of Resident Evil 5.

As tidy as that theory was, somehow we couldn't shake the feeling that the clock looked very familiar. That's because it's the same clock that was used to count down to the release of Resident Evil 4 in January 2005. "Sorry to disappoint your readers, but that clock is in no way related to RE5," a friendly Capcom rep told us. "Basically that site has remained live, but it seems the clock hasn't been removed so it's been counting 'forwards' since RE4 was released for the GameCube (notice the negative mark in front of 417). Our Web guys are having that fixed so it doesn't confuse anyone anymore." Sure enough, the clock is now gone, a development that blows that rumor away faster than Leon S. Kennedy messily dispatching a homicidal villager.