Umbrella falls, but what it knew does not vanish with it. Between 2003 and 2013 its viruses, its data and its people end up scattered across a black market for bioweapons. Governments and NGOs set up new agencies to chase that market, and the companies that feed it are sometimes the same ones paying for those agencies. It is the decade of Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6: the BSAA, Tricell, Wesker, Simmons and the C-Virus.
This page tells the whole period. The parasite that reaches Kijuju has its own story in Las Plagas and Los Iluminados, and Wesker has his own page. For who each character is across the whole saga, see the who’s who.
The world after Umbrella
Spoilers: the backstory of Resident Evil 5 and 6; one line of Revelations and Revelations 2.
The fall. In early 2003, after the raid on an Umbrella base in the Caucasus, Wesker hands the company’s archives to the US government. That evidence sinks it. Sources disagree on the exact end: some say 2003, others March 2004. What is certain is that Umbrella collapses between 2003 and 2004. Its earlier history is in Umbrella.
Without Umbrella, what is left is a market. B.O.W.s (bio-organic weapons) and samples are sold to guerrillas, to governments and to whoever pays. Several organisations are born or grow to chase it:
- The BSAA (Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance). Eleven people found it after Umbrella’s fall, among them Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. Sources waver between 2003 and 2004. It is funded by the federation of pharmaceutical companies that helped convict Umbrella, and one of its big backers is Tricell, an irony Resident Evil 5 will bring out. At first it is an NGO with observer status. From late 2005 it comes under the UN, and by 2009 it has branches in Europe, North America, South America, East Africa, West Africa, the Middle East, the Far East and Oceania. It works in squads of twelve (the “Alpha Team”) and with lone agents. The BSAA file in Resident Evil 5 and The BSAA in Resident Evil 6 tell its story: today it is sponsored by the UN and can make arrests anywhere in the world.
- The FBC (Federal Bioterrorism Commission). A US agency created in 2001 and run by Morgan Lansdale. Lansdale armed the group Il Veltro for the Terragrigia Panic (summer 2004), a city destroyed by the Regia Solis satellite. After his arrest the FBC was disbanded in 2005 and folded into the BSAA. That is the story of Revelations, which the guide does not cover; you’ll find it in Other games.
- The DSO (Division of Security Operations). The US government’s anti-bioterror agency, “the sword of the President”. President Adam Benford creates it in 2011 out of the team that had been hunting Umbrella, where Leon and Barry had already served. Leon is one of its founders, and Sherry Birkin joins in 2012 from the NSA. Resident Evil 6’s Field Operations Support file describes the FOS, also created by Benford in 2011, where Hunnigan coordinates and Leon is the chief field agent.
- TerraSave. An NGO born of the 1998 cover-up that helps the victims of bioterrorism. Claire Redfield works there. The WilPharma scandal hits it in 2005, and in 2011 one of its own, Neil Fisher, betrays it on Sein Island (Revelations 2).
- Tricell. A multinational with three divisions: shipping, natural resources and pharmaceuticals. It grew out of Travis Trading, per the Tricell file. Around 2006 its African branch is run by Excella Gionne, of the founding family, to whom Wesker had passed t-Virus data. With the middleman Ricardo Irving she sets up a B.O.W. trade to pay for research, and reopens Umbrella’s old centre under the Ndipaya ruins.
One more name remains. In 2007, Umbrella’s US assets are reorganised as Blue Umbrella, run by former staff the government trusts, with the logo in blue “as atonement”. It researches and builds anti-B.O.W. gear and leaves the fighting to the BSAA. Do not confuse it with Neo-Umbrella, further down.
2005–2006: Degeneration and Infinite Darkness
Spoilers: the CG films Degeneration and Infinite Darkness.
The CG films are part of the games’ continuity. The decade’s first two show Tricell before Kijuju. The details are in Films and series.
Degeneration (set in November 2005). A t-Virus attack hits Harvardville Airport. Claire, with TerraSave, and Leon, a federal agent, meet again seven years after Raccoon City. Behind it is Frederic Downing, head researcher at the pharmaceutical company WilPharma and a former Umbrella employee, who stages outbreaks to sell t-Virus and G-Virus samples. In the end Tricell buys the bankrupt WilPharma and recovers the G samples. It is the first sign of its ambitions.
Infinite Darkness (set in 2006). A hack and an outbreak at the White House put Leon beside agents Jason and Shen May. Meanwhile, in Penamstan, a South Asian republic, Claire finds a boy’s drawings of the 2000 civil war. Jason’s unit had been exposed there to a t-Virus strain tested with Tricell’s help under Defense Secretary Wilson. The series adds Tricell’s early collusion with people in the US government.
Resident Evil 5’s DLC: Lost in Nightmares and Desperate Escape
Spoilers: Resident Evil 5 and its two DLC.
In August 2006 the BSAA gets a tip on the hideout of Oswell E. Spencer, Umbrella’s last surviving founder. Chris and Jill raid his mansion in Europe. This is Lost in Nightmares, Resident Evil 5’s playable prologue.
The guards are dead, and so is Spencer: Wesker has just killed him. Spencer had leaked his whereabouts to Wesker through an informant, “Roberto or Ricardo”, per Patrick’s Memoirs 3, and had told him he was a product of his experiments. After the Blob and the fight with Wesker, Jill throws herself and Wesker through a window and over the cliff to save Chris. No body is found, and in November 2006 she is declared dead. The full story of that night is on Wesker’s page.
Desperate Escape happens three years later, alongside the end of the campaign. Jill, just freed, escapes the Tricell facility with Josh Stone. Her goal is to radio Chris about Wesker’s weakness. On the way they face that chapter’s bosses, and the pilot Doug dies at the helipad.
Resident Evil 5: Kijuju
Spoilers: Resident Evil 5, chapters 1-1 to 3-3.
In March 2009 the BSAA sends an operation to Kijuju, an autonomous zone in West Africa, to stop Ricardo Irving before a bioweapons sale. One wiki page says January, but the others agree on 5 March. Chris Redfield arrives, who since 2006 has been chasing rumours that Jill is alive. He is met by Sheva Alomar, an agent of the West Africa branch who lost her family in an accident at an Umbrella plant (Sheva Alomar).
- 1-1. Reynard Fisher, an undercover BSAA agent, hands them their weapons. Soon after, the Executioner Majini executes him in the square. The whole town turns on them. They are Majini, infected with Plagas, and their origin is on the Plagas page.
- 1-2. Alpha Team has been wiped out by an Uroboros test subject. Its captain, Dan DeChant, dies warning them “it was a set-up”. Chris and Sheva burn the creature in a furnace.
- 2-1. A Kipepeo downs Kirk Mathison’s helicopter. Josh Stone’s Delta Team rescues them, and among its data is a photo of Jill.
- 2-2. In the mines, Irving escapes with the help of a hooded woman.
- 2-3. On the savannah they find the Delta camp destroyed. The Ndesu crushes Dave Johnson, and of the BSAA teams only Josh survives. HQ orders a pull-out. Chris refuses because of Jill, and Sheva stays with him.
- 3-1 and 3-2. The marshes, the Ndipaya village and Tricell’s tents. Early in chapter 3, Chris tells Sheva what happened to Jill in 2006. Josh comes back, and Irving escapes again with the hooded woman, leaving explosive charges on the dock.
- 3-3. Cornered on his ship, Irving injects himself with a Dominant Plaga and mutates (Irving). Before dying he points to the caves and names Excella. His file paints him as the foreman of Tricell’s refinery and a B.O.W. dealer: he is the one who turned the BSAA mission into a trap.
Resident Evil 5: the Tricell lab and the volcano
Spoilers: Resident Evil 5, chapters 4-1 to 6-3.
- 4-1 and 4-2. Underground lie the Ndipaya city (Ndipaya Tribe) and the Stairway of the Sun flower, from which Umbrella took the Progenitor virus. Chapter 4-1 ends with a memory of Wesker’s: the night he killed Spencer.
- 5-1. Tricell has taken over Umbrella’s old African centre and filled it with thousands of pods holding kidnapped test subjects. After the U-8, Chris finds Jill’s pod empty, and Excella Gionne appears on a screen. Excella had ordered the project’s researchers eliminated: the Report on Implementation of Preventing Information Leaks in 5-3 tells it hour by hour.
- 5-2. Excella unleashes Uroboros Mkono.
- 5-3. In the Monarch Room, Albert Wesker reveals who the hooded woman is: Jill, controlled by a device on her chest that injects her with the P30 drug. After the fight (Wesker in the Monarch Room), Chris and Sheva tear the device off. Jill sends them after Wesker.
- 6-1. Tricell’s ship. Excella drops a case of Serum PG67A/W, the serum Wesker needs in exact doses. Sheva keeps several syringes.
- 6-2. Wesker injects Excella with Uroboros, and she becomes Uroboros Aheri. The ship’s control room holds the Report on Project W and Spencer’s Notebook, two pieces of Wesker’s and Umbrella’s past.
- 6-3. Jill radios in that an overdose of the serum poisons Wesker. Chris and Sheva inject him in the hangar (Wesker in the Hangar). Wesker flees in the bomber, which ends up crashing into a volcano. There Wesker fuses with the virus (Uroboros Wesker); Josh and Jill’s helicopter arrives, and two rockets finish him on 7 March 2009.
The Uroboros Plan explains what was at stake. Uroboros is a Progenitor strain meant to kill everyone but the genetically “worthy”. Wesker planned to launch it in missiles from a bomber at the height of the tropopause, so the wind would spread it around the world. Wesker had kept Jill alive: the t-Virus antibodies she had carried since 1998 helped him tame the strain, and afterwards he used her as a drugged agent.
The BSAA wins its biggest operation yet, but loses two teams on the way and learns that one of its backers was making the weapons it hunted. Tricell is exposed. Chris closes with one line: “For a future without fear… yeah, it’s worth it.”
Between Kijuju and Edonia
Spoilers: Resident Evil 5’s epilogues, Revelations 2 in one line and the CG film Damnation.
With Wesker dead, several pieces move:
- Sherry Birkin leaves custody. Since Raccoon City she had lived under government guardianship, and her legal guardian was Derek C. Simmons. In 2009 she is freed and agrees to work as an agent, first at the NSA and from 2012 at the DSO (Life without Freedom).
- Chris goes back to leading teams. In 2010 he recruits an Army sniper, Piers Nivans, as the BSAA’s future (Piers’ File). That same year he meets Leon; per Chris and Leon, Claire is what ties them.
- Jill recovers over a long time. The wiki says, without a firm source, that she and Chris recruited Barry Burton into the BSAA.
- Sheva stays in the BSAA. Per the wiki, in 2012 she offers to help Piers when Chris goes missing.
- 2011 is the year of Revelations 2 (Sein Island, Alex Wesker’s death), which you’ll find in Other games.
Damnation (set in 2011). Leon, now with the DSO, disobeys orders to check rumours of B.O.W.s in the Eastern Slav Republic’s civil war. The rebels are using Plagas that the government itself had slipped them, and Ada steals a sample while posing as a BSAA agent. Per the wiki, Simmons had hired her anonymously. President Svetlana Belikova had her own bioweapons, Tyrants included, and a joint US–Russian intervention ends her rule. The film leaves Simmons as the shadow paying Ada.
Simmons, The Family and Carla
Spoilers: Resident Evil 6.
The Family is a secret society older than American independence, founded by the English Simmons family. Its seat is in the caverns under Tall Oaks Cathedral (Tall Oaks Cathedral and the Underground Lab). Its idea of “stability” is keeping the United States on top, and for that its ties to Umbrella must stay buried (The Family).
Its head in this period is Derek C. Simmons, the President’s National Security Advisor. When the United States shut down its own bioweapons research after Raccoon City, The Family began funding it privately. Per Scorched Earth, Simmons is the one who ordered Raccoon City wiped out in 1998, and that night is told in Raccoon City. Ada worked for him before that and left when she learned he was behind the city’s destruction. Simmons has been obsessed with her ever since (Ada and Derek).
The C-Virus is created by Carla Radames, a child prodigy with a doctorate at 15 who was recruited by the Simmons foundation. The project starts in 2001 from T-Veronica and G-Virus genes. The wiki adds that Simmons’s team developed it from the blood samples they regularly took from Sherry. Per The C-Virus, it was first used as a “health drug” on Eastern European mercenaries. The C stands for Chrysalid. Inhaled, it makes zombies. Injected, it makes J’avo: soldiers who keep their training, talk and use weapons, and who mutate where they are hurt (J’avo).
Project Ada is Simmons’s obsession turned into science. He orders a C-Virus strain able to recreate Ada Wong. After 12,235 failed subjects it works on 30 April 2009, with Carla forced to be the subject. The woman who comes out has Ada’s face and keeps a spark of Carla, who swears to destroy him (Derek and Carla). She takes over The Family’s facilities in Lanshiang and founds Neo-Umbrella, a death cult of J’avo soldiers. Her aim is to bring down Simmons and the world he protects (Neo-Umbrella). The wiki dates its founding to 2010, but its own page asks for that to be verified.
Resident Evil 6: Edonia, December 2012
Spoilers: Resident Evil 6, chapters Chris 2, Jake 1 and Jake 2.
The civil war in Edonia, in Eastern Europe, becomes the first big test of the C-Virus. A woman calling herself Ada Wong, who is really Carla, sells the rebels “performance enhancers”.
- Chris 2 is a memory of 24 December 2012. Chris leads Alpha Team against the rebels’ Ogroman. Carla springs a trap: a needle bomb turns his men into Napad. The rookie Finn Macauley dies. Only Chris and Piers survive. Chris loses his memory and spends six months drinking in Eastern Europe (Chris’ Amnesia).
- Jake 1 happens that same night. Sherry Birkin, now an agent, finds Jake Muller, a mercenary for the rebels whose blood carries antibodies against the C-Virus. Jake names his price. Neo-Umbrella sets the Ustanak on him (Ustanak).
- Jake 2. They flee through the snowy mountains and a cave, where the Ustanak comes after them again, and on 25 December they are captured. Carla tells Jake who his father was. They spend six months as prisoners in China while Carla uses Jake’s blood to improve the virus (Enhanced C-Virus).
Resident Evil 6: Leon and Helena
Spoilers: Resident Evil 6, Leon’s campaign.
29 June to 1 July 2013. President Adam Benford is about to reveal, at Ivy University in Tall Oaks, the truth about the government’s role in Raccoon City. That night the town falls.
- Leon 1. Benford is infected, and Leon has to shoot him (Leon and Adam). Beside him is Helena Harper, of the Secret Service, who is hiding a secret. Hunnigan guides them by radio out of the university and the town.
- Leon 2. In the cathedral, the Lepotitsa releases the gas that turned Tall Oaks (Lepotitsa). Underneath is Simmons’s lab, and there Helena’s sister, Deborah, mutates (Deborah Harper) and dies.
- Leon 3. Leon and Helena escape through the catacombs, hunted by the Brzak. Simmons blames them for the President’s murder and bombs Tall Oaks.
- Leon 4. They fly to China, where another Lepotitsa on the plane is waiting. They cross paths with Jake and Sherry at the crash site, and with Chris at the medical centre. The Helena’s Crime file finally tells her secret: Simmons held Deborah hostage and forced Helena to send a false alert that drew the agents away from the President. On “Ada“‘s orders Simmons is infected, and Leon faces him on the train.
- Leon 5. A C-Virus missile hits Tatchi. At the Quad Tower, Simmons changes again and again: dinosaur, scorpion on the rooftop and fly. With Ada’s help they finish him on 1 July. Leon and Helena are cleared at Deborah’s grave. The game’s Prelude is a flash-forward to this night.
Resident Evil 6: Chris and Piers
Spoilers: Resident Evil 6, Chris’s campaign.
- Chris 1. Piers has found Chris in a bar, with no memory, and brought him back. On 29 and 30 June 2013 the BSAA’s Alpha Team goes into Lanshiang, China, to rescue hostages from among the J’avo.
- Chris 3. The Iluzija, an invisible snake, kills almost the whole team. Carla turns Marco Rose, of Bravo Team, into a Gnezdo. Chris is about to kill “Ada”, but Leon stops him.
- Chris 4. On Neo-Umbrella’s aircraft carrier, a gunman from The Family shoots Carla. Even so, the C-Virus missile leaves for Tatchi. An internal memo, From the Files of Neo-Umbrella, records the death of “Ada Wong” and triggers “Plan D”.
- Chris 5. In the seabed lab waits Haos, Neo-Umbrella’s final weapon, built to spread the C-Virus around the world (Haos). Piers injects himself with the C-Virus to beat it, saves Chris and dies on 1 July 2013. Chris will stay in the BSAA, leading a new team.
Resident Evil 6: Jake and Sherry
Spoilers: Resident Evil 6, Jake’s campaign.
Jake was born around 1992 in Edonia. His mother had left Wesker and raised him alone, without Wesker knowing he had a son. Jake became a mercenary to pay for his mother’s treatment, but she died anyway (Jake’s Childhood). From his father he inherited the immunity (Jake Muller’s Infamous Father). The RE6 guide gives Wesker his own entry, though he has been dead since 2009.
- Jake 3. On 30 June 2013, Jake and Sherry escape Neo-Umbrella’s facility in China (Detention Center). Jake learns more about his father.
- Jake 4. They flee through Lanshiang, run into the Ubistvo and into Leon and Helena, and are captured again.
- Jake 5. Chris frees them in the underwater lab. Per IGN, this is where Chris tells Jake he killed his father, though the exact chapter is not confirmed. Jake finishes off the Ustanak on the tram. His blood is used to make the anti-C vaccine (C-Virus Vaccine). At the end, Jake cuts his price for Sherry to 50 dollars and leaves to start over, fighting B.O.W.s in a war-torn country, his identity protected by the BSAA.
Resident Evil 6: Ada
Spoilers: Resident Evil 6, Ada’s campaign.
Ada Wong’s campaign starts days before the others and fills in their gaps.
- Ada 1. A contact from “Simmons” sends Ada to a Neo-Umbrella submarine, where the locks answer to her fingerprints and her voice (Submarine). She finds orders for the Edonia job, one she never did. The Report on Jake Muller, a report for Simmons, confirms by DNA whose son Jake is.
- Ada 2. In Tall Oaks she helps Leon and Helena against Deborah, and in the lab she finds proof that there is a copy of her.
- Ada 3. In Lanshiang she dodges an Ubistvo and helps Jake and Sherry without being seen. Two Ada Wongs makes it clear: it was the fake Ada who contacted the real one.
- Ada 4. On the carrier, Carla, wounded by The Family, injects herself with the enhanced strain (Unlimited Transformations), and Ada kills her (Carla Radames).
- Ada 5. Ada helps Leon and Helena finish Simmons, destroys Carla’s last chrysalid and her lab, and takes a new job. Carla’s Revenge leaves one question open: nobody knows why Carla called the real Ada.
What comes after
Spoilers: Resident Evil 6’s endings, the CG films Vendetta and Death Island and, in passing, Resident Evil 7, Village and Requiem.
Resident Evil 6 leaves a President murdered to hide Raccoon City, a vaccine, Chris back on duty, Sherry at the DSO and Jake with a new life. Leon and Helena return to work. Neo-Umbrella dies with Carla. The Family, on the other hand, survives under new leaders, and per the wiki it even gets a new vice president into place.
Two CG films close the classic decade. They are in Films and series:
Vendetta (set in 2014). Chris, now a BSAA captain, fails to save an agent in Mexico from the arms dealer Glenn Arias. Four months later Arias prepares an A-virus attack on New York, a weapon made with Plagas supplied by surviving members of Los Iluminados. A mole from that cult helps The Family blow up Leon’s DSO team. Rebecca Chambers, who is researching a vaccine against the A-virus, is kidnapped and infected; Chris cures her and, with a burned-out Leon, stops him.
Death Island (set in 2015). On Alcatraz, Leon, Chris, Claire, Rebecca and Jill, on her first operation since Wesker controlled her, face Dylan Blake, a soldier contracted by Umbrella in 1998 and left behind in Raccoon City. It is the last time the classic cast appears together before the Mold era.
From there the threat changes shape, but two threads from this page carry on:
- Blue Umbrella, per the wiki, uses Wesker’s research against bioweapons, which had been confiscated, to build the “Albert” weapon series, and in 2017 it turns up at the end of Resident Evil 7, when Chris arrives with it by helicopter. The Mold page tells that story.
- The BSAA rots. In 2014 it fails to seize Eveline in Munich. In 2017 it covers up the Dulvey case as a gas leak. In 2021, in Village’s village, it fields B.O.W.s dressed as soldiers. By 2023 its North American branch is acting on its own, and that is where Requiem begins.
The organisation born to end Umbrella’s market ends up, twenty years later, suspected of feeding it. To follow this decade’s characters past 2013, see the who’s who.