Resident Evil

Resident Evil, known as Biohazard (バイオハザード) in Japan, is a highly successful franchise of survival horror and science fiction that started life as video games developed by Capcom and created by Shinji Mikami. The games have sold over 30 million copies as of February 2006.
The series is often credited with popularizing the survival horror game genre. It is often miscredited with creating the survival horror genre, when in fact the genre was established by Infogrames' 1992 Alone in the Dark.
The success of this franchise has spawned several video games, several comic book series, novelizations, a Hollywood action film series, and a variety of action figures. While the games mostly adhere to a consistent storyline, there are enough deviations from the game plot within the films and novels to be considered alternate story lines.
The original Resident Evil revolves around a series of cannibalistic homicides that occur in the Arklay Mountains region, situated north of the fictional Raccoon City in 1998. The local police's Special Tactics And Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S.) are commissioned to investigate the sources of these murders. When S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team, the initial team deployed to the area, fails to report back, S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team goes on a rescue mission to find them. They are led to a seemingly abandoned mansion, where the player, as either Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield, encounters Zombies and other creatures, leading them to discover the remains of most of their comrades in the house. In the end, it is revealed that the house is actually a front for a top-secret laboratory owned by the international Umbrella Corporation, and that the creatures are the result of experiments with a bio-weapon called the t-Virus. The prequel Resident Evil Zero explores the cause of the viral outbreak and Bravo Team's ordeal prior to the events of the Mansion incident, following a S.T.A.R.S. member named Rebecca Chambers and her unlikely ally, a convicted murderer named Billy Coen who escaped from police custody and found himself in the thick of a viral nightmare.
The following game, Resident Evil 2, takes place two months after the events of the original game in Raccoon City itself. With S.T.A.R.S. unable to convict Umbrella for their wrongdoings, the company continues their experiments within an underground facility. However, a botched attempt to steal a former scientist's (Dr. William Birkin) work results in the t-Virus being leaked into the city's sewage. This results in most of the city's population being turned into zombies, leaving only a few survivors trying to find a way to escape the city alive. The game's focus is on Leon S. Kennedy, a rookie cop with the Raccoon Police Department, and Claire Redfield, who came to Raccoon to find her missing brother Chris.
The third game, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, takes place around this same time period, and features a similar premise. Also, a powerful monster known as the Nemesis chases Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliveira, a mercenary hired by Umbrella, around the city, which gives the game its name. The game concludes its story by depicting the city's ultimate destruction by a massive air strike.