Origins of The Umbrella Corporation
advertisement
VOICE OVER: Ashley Bowman
WRITTEN BY: Alex Slade
The Umbrella Corporation is a lot more than just a run of the mill zombie laboratory that makes great hair products. Understanding the entire history of the Resident Evil series is difficult, but knowing the history of Umbrella does make it a lot easier to follow.
Umbrella Corporation. Our business is life itself. If you were a Raccoon City citizen; hell, just a human being in general before 1998, you would have seen and heard that slogan all over the place. Welcome to MojoPlays and today we’ll be taking a look at the origins of the Umbrella Corporation.
Resident Evil’s evil conglomerate business didn’t appear evil. In fact, they just looked like your standard pharmaceuticals company, albeit a massive one. Alongside drugs, people would have umbrella branded shampoo, toothbrushes, and other general toiletries. On the outside, Umbrella Corp looked like any other business.
You know how people can come up with wild and outlandish conspiracies about almost anything? Well, with the size of Umbrella Corp, its global outreach, and its many subsidiaries, you’d probably be surprised if there wasn’t anything shady going on. Sadly, they weren’t just your friendly neighborhood drug company. Their many subsidiaries and research labs were used as a front for something far more sinister; viral mutation. We’ve all played the games, and we all know how that turned out, but let's go back to the beginning. How did Umbrella start?
Umbrella Corp had three prominent founders, who eventually came to have three very different goals with the direction of the company; Oswell E. Spencer, Edward Ashford, and James Marcus. All of them were university students in the 1950s, and through their shared interest in eugenics, they made a decision to form an expedition to West Africa in search for the mysterious flower Stairway of the Sun in 1966.
Why a flower? Well, it was said to give powers to its consumers by way of mutagenic viral infection. After acquiring the flower, the team was unable to cultivate it on U.S soil. Eventually, they would push out the surrounding tribe of the Sun Garden, where the flower was initially found, and develop a research center there in the hope of finding more success.
Dubbed the progenitor virus, exposure to the strand in the flower would just, you know, kill people, but that didn’t stop anyone, did it? Umbrella Pharmaceuticals was formed as a means of researching the virus, and hopefully coming up with a result that didn’t end in agonizing deaths.
So, what was the ultimate goal? What did Umbrella hope to gain by researching the progenitor virus? The three main founding members wanted to rule the world. Yep, standard evil organization stuff. Dubbed The Wesker Project, Spencer’s goal was to create a utopia of highly intelligent, superhumans, in which he ruled over, to guarantee the survival of mankind, and propel it into a superior future. Sounds swell.
Unfortunately for Umbrella, research required funding, and they had none, so what does an evil corporation do? Create secret underground labs, of course! Spencer, Marcus, and Ashford each had their own, with Spencer’s situated underneath a mad mansion in the Arklay mountains full of deadly and cryptic traps to keep intruders out. He even had his designers and lead architect killed so only he would know the inner workings of his mansion. They then sold strands of the progenitor virus, called the Tyrant Virus, to the U.S military. Which military doesn’t want a deadly weaponized virus that results in a sure death?
Years went on, and as undoubtedly expected when researching and experimenting on a death-inducing virus, Edward Ashford died in an accident in his lab, an accident thought to be set up by Spencer who decided he wanted to have sole ownership of Umbrella. Over ten years later, the T-virus transformed into creating the creatures we all know and love; flesh-eating zombies. A fate worse than death, this excited the two remaining founders - obviously - and the company began to expand rapidly.
To further their illegal goals of viral and human experimentation, more fronts had to be created, and a plethora of subsidiaries was created. Transport services, tourism, consumer products, and industrial machine manufacturing were all used to aid Umbrella in their mission for what was pretty much clear at this state; world domination.
As James Marcus focused his efforts on the T-Virus to create Bio-Organic Weapons, or, B.O.W’s for short, paranoia began to form between the two remaining founders, and eventually, Spencer fearing Marcus’ takeover, sent an assassination team to eliminate him and seize his assets. Before his death, Marcus had experimented on mixing the T-virus with leeches, creating a Queen Leech. Among the assassination team were Albert Wesker, a survivor and success story of the Wesker Project, and William Birkin a prodigy virologist employed by Umbrella at a young age, who took over for the development of the T-virus. After Marcus’ body was disposed of, the Queen Leech merged with his body over the span of ten years, and eventually took on his memories.
The Golgotha virus, or, G-virus for short, was later evolved from strains of the Progenitor virus by research continued by William Birkin in the late ’80s and it’s properties were more in line with what Spencer had envisioned for the future. It’s regenerative and mutational properties were hoped to create the race of superhumans that Spencer had dreamed of.
While Birkin’s research was promising, he was afraid he still wouldn’t get the promotion he had dreamed of, so what’s one to do? Sabotage the whole facility, right? Yep! An Umbrella task force was sent to eliminate Birkin and retrieve the samples of the G-virus, but Birkin consumed them all and destroyed the samples of the T-virus along with them.
As you could probably tell by now, Umbrella was destroying itself from the inside, but it would soon have ripple effects on the outside world. Marcus took revenge on Spencer by releasing the T-virus in the Spencer mansion, where our favorite S.T.A.R.S members Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine would later investigate. The destroyed T-Virus samples at Birkin’s lab would be fed on by rats, which would then up in Raccoon City’s water supply, where Claire Redfield and Leon S. Kennedy would find themselves fighting for their lives in a desperate attempt to escape the city.
This just scratches the surface of the ongoings of Umbrella Corp and all its subsidiaries, and most of its following incidents are explored in the later games. Go on, get them played, though we wouldn’t mind if you skipped a couple of them.
Resident Evil’s evil conglomerate business didn’t appear evil. In fact, they just looked like your standard pharmaceuticals company, albeit a massive one. Alongside drugs, people would have umbrella branded shampoo, toothbrushes, and other general toiletries. On the outside, Umbrella Corp looked like any other business.
You know how people can come up with wild and outlandish conspiracies about almost anything? Well, with the size of Umbrella Corp, its global outreach, and its many subsidiaries, you’d probably be surprised if there wasn’t anything shady going on. Sadly, they weren’t just your friendly neighborhood drug company. Their many subsidiaries and research labs were used as a front for something far more sinister; viral mutation. We’ve all played the games, and we all know how that turned out, but let's go back to the beginning. How did Umbrella start?
Umbrella Corp had three prominent founders, who eventually came to have three very different goals with the direction of the company; Oswell E. Spencer, Edward Ashford, and James Marcus. All of them were university students in the 1950s, and through their shared interest in eugenics, they made a decision to form an expedition to West Africa in search for the mysterious flower Stairway of the Sun in 1966.
Why a flower? Well, it was said to give powers to its consumers by way of mutagenic viral infection. After acquiring the flower, the team was unable to cultivate it on U.S soil. Eventually, they would push out the surrounding tribe of the Sun Garden, where the flower was initially found, and develop a research center there in the hope of finding more success.
Dubbed the progenitor virus, exposure to the strand in the flower would just, you know, kill people, but that didn’t stop anyone, did it? Umbrella Pharmaceuticals was formed as a means of researching the virus, and hopefully coming up with a result that didn’t end in agonizing deaths.
So, what was the ultimate goal? What did Umbrella hope to gain by researching the progenitor virus? The three main founding members wanted to rule the world. Yep, standard evil organization stuff. Dubbed The Wesker Project, Spencer’s goal was to create a utopia of highly intelligent, superhumans, in which he ruled over, to guarantee the survival of mankind, and propel it into a superior future. Sounds swell.
Unfortunately for Umbrella, research required funding, and they had none, so what does an evil corporation do? Create secret underground labs, of course! Spencer, Marcus, and Ashford each had their own, with Spencer’s situated underneath a mad mansion in the Arklay mountains full of deadly and cryptic traps to keep intruders out. He even had his designers and lead architect killed so only he would know the inner workings of his mansion. They then sold strands of the progenitor virus, called the Tyrant Virus, to the U.S military. Which military doesn’t want a deadly weaponized virus that results in a sure death?
Years went on, and as undoubtedly expected when researching and experimenting on a death-inducing virus, Edward Ashford died in an accident in his lab, an accident thought to be set up by Spencer who decided he wanted to have sole ownership of Umbrella. Over ten years later, the T-virus transformed into creating the creatures we all know and love; flesh-eating zombies. A fate worse than death, this excited the two remaining founders - obviously - and the company began to expand rapidly.
To further their illegal goals of viral and human experimentation, more fronts had to be created, and a plethora of subsidiaries was created. Transport services, tourism, consumer products, and industrial machine manufacturing were all used to aid Umbrella in their mission for what was pretty much clear at this state; world domination.
As James Marcus focused his efforts on the T-Virus to create Bio-Organic Weapons, or, B.O.W’s for short, paranoia began to form between the two remaining founders, and eventually, Spencer fearing Marcus’ takeover, sent an assassination team to eliminate him and seize his assets. Before his death, Marcus had experimented on mixing the T-virus with leeches, creating a Queen Leech. Among the assassination team were Albert Wesker, a survivor and success story of the Wesker Project, and William Birkin a prodigy virologist employed by Umbrella at a young age, who took over for the development of the T-virus. After Marcus’ body was disposed of, the Queen Leech merged with his body over the span of ten years, and eventually took on his memories.
The Golgotha virus, or, G-virus for short, was later evolved from strains of the Progenitor virus by research continued by William Birkin in the late ’80s and it’s properties were more in line with what Spencer had envisioned for the future. It’s regenerative and mutational properties were hoped to create the race of superhumans that Spencer had dreamed of.
While Birkin’s research was promising, he was afraid he still wouldn’t get the promotion he had dreamed of, so what’s one to do? Sabotage the whole facility, right? Yep! An Umbrella task force was sent to eliminate Birkin and retrieve the samples of the G-virus, but Birkin consumed them all and destroyed the samples of the T-virus along with them.
As you could probably tell by now, Umbrella was destroying itself from the inside, but it would soon have ripple effects on the outside world. Marcus took revenge on Spencer by releasing the T-virus in the Spencer mansion, where our favorite S.T.A.R.S members Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine would later investigate. The destroyed T-Virus samples at Birkin’s lab would be fed on by rats, which would then up in Raccoon City’s water supply, where Claire Redfield and Leon S. Kennedy would find themselves fighting for their lives in a desperate attempt to escape the city.
This just scratches the surface of the ongoings of Umbrella Corp and all its subsidiaries, and most of its following incidents are explored in the later games. Go on, get them played, though we wouldn’t mind if you skipped a couple of them.
