Executives at Microsoft, EA, Valve, and seemingly countless other gaming companies are either praying at the church of AI or actively chopping off their own legs through layoffs and other cost-cutting measures to invest in generative AI, but don't they understand their sacrifices mean nothing when we already reached AI perfection with Resident Evil 4?
21 years ago, during E3 2004, former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi bragged to IGN that the – now, we know for sure – revolutionary shooter Resident Evil 4 had incredible enemy AI because they "use weapons, of course."
Also, despite the fact that the survival horror game's infected villager brains were no doubt turning to strawberry smoothies inside skulls, these enemies were clever because they "will try to flank you on the sides. They'll get behind and to the sides of you."
"They'll also try to attack in groups," Kobayashi said, "so that you don't have a place to escape to. If you go into a building, maybe something that has two stories, [protagonist] Leon may barricade the first floor, but they're smart – they'll try to come at him from the second floor instead.
"They come at you from all directions. They're not just going to try one way in to get you. If they can't get in that way, they will, like a smart person – a person who can actually think – try another way."
The way Kobayashi describes enemy AI, which is notably different from the sloppy generative AI technology popular now, sounds quaint in hindsight. But it also highlights a fatal flaw in how some people conceptualize artificial intelligence; these trained computer systems have never been able to "think" in the way most people understand "thinking." But the idea persists, and modern industry leaders keep wrongly peddling the idea that genAI can and should replace human hands.
It can't. It's incapable of creativity, and it still often thinks we have thumbs in weird places. Instead of enacting drastic layoffs and practically making marriage commitments to machines, we should leave such abominations to the professionals – Leon Kennedy and his great hair.
