is a fictional city depicted in the Resident Evil series of survival horror video games developed by Capcom. A central location for the franchise; an underground lab for the evil Umbrella Corporation was constructed beneath it, unbeknownst to most of its citizens. The lab covertly manufactures deadly bioweapons and monsters, the unauthorized release of which causes a zombie apocalypse within the city from which various characters, including Leon S. Kennedy, Claire Redfield, and Jill Valentine, must escape, the latter while pursued by the bioweapons.
Spencer Mansion, the setting of Resident Evil, is built nearby, and the city itself was the primary setting of Resident Evil 2, a portion of which is set within the Raccoon Police Station. The city reappears in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and the spin-offs Resident Evil: Outbreak and Resident Evil: Outbreak: File 2. A destroyed Raccoon City and police station returns decades later as a main setting for Resident Evil Requiem. The city is also the primary location for the first film adaptation, its sequel, and the 2021 and 2026 reboots. Outside of the Resident Evil series, Raccoon City has been modded into Left 4 Dead as a playable map.
Concept and design
The original Resident Evil was initially intended as a remake of the 1989 video game Sweet Home, which took place in a haunted mansion in the Japanese countryside, but Capcom no longer held the rights. Therefore, producer Tokuro Fujiwara and director Shinji Mikami searched for ideas for a new setting entirely. They drew heavy inspiration from the works of horror filmmaker George A. Romero, who shot his zombie films in the environs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and decided to go with an "Anytown, USA" setting to appeal to a Western audience. The city was initially named "Harnbee", but was renamed to "Raccoon City". While a longstanding theory is that the city was named after the tanuki, which features heavily in pop culture, the name refers specifically to the North American mammal due to its purposeful English transliteration. MeriStation analyzed the design of the city in the original Resident Evil 2 and 3 and said it resembles more of a Japanese city than an American one due to the narrow streets. The North Street and Fleet Street of Boston, Massachusetts was used for Raccoon City in the opening monologue of the original Resident Evil 3. In the Resident Evil 2 remake, the city's skyline is based on those from Montreal, Quebec in Central Canada. The instructions manual for the original Resident Evil 2 described Raccoon City was originally a small hamlet.
Appearances
In video games
In the canon of the video games, Raccoon City is located in the Midwestern United States. Founded in the 1800s, it was largely unremarkable until the 1960s, when Oswell E. Spencer commissioned the construction of Spencer Mansion in the Arklay Mountains near the city. A research facility was constructed beneath that served as the basis for Umbrella Corporation's research. Umbrella expanded into Raccoon City, revitalizing its economy and becoming its largest employer. Meanwhile, they built two massive NEST facilities under the city that developed BOWs, or bio-organic weapons.
Raccoon City appears as one of the levels in Capcom's Under the Skin. A replica of the town is featured in Umbrella Corps.
In films and television
thumb|right|The Toronto City Hall, on which the city hall of Raccoon City was based.
thumb|right|The skyline of Raccoon City as depicted in the film [[Resident Evil: Apocalypse.]]
Anderson films
Raccoon City is depicted in the Anderson films as a 21st-century cosmopolitan city with an infrastructure largely funded by the Umbrella Corporation. The first film features the Hive as a secret laboratory under the city. Housing more than 500 employees, the facility has an artificial intelligence, the Red Queen, controlling its security. The theft and deliberate release of the T-virus starts the chain of events depicted in the opening of the first film. Although the Hive is sealed off at the end of the film, it is reopened in the second film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, by the Umbrella Corporation. Infected creatures spread out of the re-opened Hive into Raccoon City and Umbrella places the city under quarantine. In an attempt to stop the spread of the T-virus, Umbrella destroys Raccoon City with a nuclear missile near the end of the film. In the third film, it is revealed that this does not stop the virus from spreading; within five years the human race is on the verge of extinction, and the vast majority of the Earth is a barren wasteland crawling with zombies and mutated animals.
Instead of creating large sets for Raccoon City and the Hive, the film crew filmed on location at Toronto, Canada and Berlin, Germany. Due to the fictional city being located in the Midwestern United States, the film's director Paul Anderson chose Toronto to serve as the fictional city. In the third installment, Resident Evil: Extinction, there is a brief shot of Raccoon City: the camera zooms out from Raccoon City to a view of the Earth - in this shot, Raccoon City is depicted somewhere in either Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, or Ohio. The city was filmed untouched; many of its prominent features, such as its city hall and the CN Tower, are visible. For the underground train station in the Hive, Anderson chose to film in the Berlin U-Bahn. He said the atmosphere of the underground labyrinth structure was conducive to the acting and promoted a sense of realism and mood in the production. They also called the city undoubtedly the star of Resident Evil: Requiem. Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities described the city in the original Resident Evil 2 feeling "as if it actually
existed before the zombies", saying it's more than "a cardboard prop connecting indoor levels". Both the zombies and city roads were said to be "typical and representative enough to paint images of a wider town before the catastrophe".