The bizarre design of the Raccoon City Police Department in the Resident Evil series actually has a canon explanation, as it was once a museum. The Raccoon City Police Department debuted in Resident Evil 2, with Leon and Claire arriving at the building in search of shelter from the undead hordes, unaware that it had been overrun.

Fans of the Resident Evil series have often joked about how the game worlds don’t make any sense. The Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil and the Raccoon City Police Department would be a nightmare to navigate on a daily basis. It likely would take only one day of swapping the playing card-themed keys for the staff members to get extremely frustrated. These designs might not make any sense in real life, but they don’t have to. The Resident Evil series is about fun, not realism. One only has to look at the boring realistic dungeons in Yakuza: Like A Dragon to see how an illogical setup is often way more fun to explore.

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The Raccoon City Police Department appeared in the second and third Resident Evil games (and their remakes), as well the Outbreak and Chronicles games. The players who explored the building likely noted that it was far too elaborate to be a police station. It turns out that there is a canon reason for this, but it’s buried in one of the written journals.

The History Of Resident Evil’s Raccoon City Police Department

According to Evil Resource, the player can find a document in Resident Evil Outbreak File #2 called Marvin’s memo. This memo explains that the Raccoon City Police Department used to be a museum. It was bought in the late ’80s by the police, as its central location and parking spaces made it the ideal place for a new station. The deal was brokered by Chief Irons, with Marvin speculating that his love for art is what prompted the decision. This also explains why there is a giant statue in the lobby of Resident Evil’s police station, which some staff members realized covered a secret escape route.

The Raccoon City Police Department is one of the most iconic locations in the history of the Resident Evil series, even more so than the Spencer Mansion from the first game. The police station contained some of the remaining clues that explained why the outbreak happened in the first place, as well as one of the last escape routes out of Raccoon City. The fact that the upcoming Resident Evil movie is set in Raccoon City means that the Raccoon City Police Department has a chance to appear on the big screen in all of its glory.

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Source: Evil Resource

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Scott Baird
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Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz.
A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film student before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading comic books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, regardless of what any career advisor might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘90s when his first console was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a game from a tape cassette player to a black and white TV set. Scott now writes game reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, as well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.

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