Umbrella is the company that started it all. On the outside, a huge pharmaceutical firm with offices across half the world; on the inside, a bioweapons factory that created the t-Virus, the G-Virus and the Tyrants, and that in 1998 lost control of what it had made in an entire city. This page tells its story from the man who founded it to its fall, and what it left behind.
Almost all of it happens in games this guide does not cover (from Resident Evil 0 to Code: Veronica), so here they are told in full; each one has its entry in the other games. Whatever does appear in the guides is linked.
Spoilers: this page gives away the story of RE0, RE1, RE2, RE3 and Code: Veronica; Survivor, Dead Aim, Umbrella Chronicles and Darkside Chronicles in broad strokes; RE5’s files and the Lost in Nightmares episode; Miranda’s laboratory in Village; and Requiem’s true ending.
Spencer, Ashford, Marcus and Miranda
Umbrella was born of three men. Oswell E. Spencer is a British aristocrat, an earl, obsessed with eugenics: the idea of “improving” the human species by choosing who deserves to carry on. The games spell his name Ozwell; the wiki uses Oswell. In the 1950s he studies medicine, and at that time he befriends Edward Ashford, heir to a British noble family, and Dr. James Marcus, a virologist who specialises in ancient viruses. According to the wiki, the three belong to a circle of eugenicists. Spencer will be the brains of the project and Marcus its scientist.
The Ashford family already had its own legend: its 19th-century matriarch, Veronica Ashford, was the one who raised it to the aristocracy, and her name will end up on one of the viruses in this story, T-Veronica. Patrick, Spencer’s butler, remembers that about fifty years before 2006 Spencer, Lord Ashford and Dr Marcus spent their summers together at his master’s European mansion (Patrick’s Memoirs 1).
The teacher. Village reveals the part nobody knew. In the 1950s, on a solo trek through Eastern Europe, the young Spencer collapses in the snow. He is taken in by Mother Miranda, the priestess and biologist of a village lost in the mountains, who has spent decades studying a very particular organism: the Mold, a fungus that stores the consciousness of whatever it absorbs and transforms the body of whoever carries it. Spencer stays as her student and learns from her how the Mold changes a living being.
In the end he leaves, because they want different things. Miranda only wants to bring one person back to life, her daughter Eva, who died of the Spanish flu in 1919 (Miranda’s Diary). Spencer wants to change the whole world, and the Mold is no use to him: it is not contagious enough for an infection that grows exponentially.
Years later he writes her a letter that Chris finds in Miranda’s laboratory, in Village’s chapter 12: Spencer’s Letter. Spencer calls himself that “poor half-dead medical student in the snow”, mentions “the revelations I came to 15 years ago when I stayed in your village”, and gives her the news: “I have found the key to evolution! The ‘progenitor,’ a virus found in Africa. I plan to start a company with friends and colleagues… I will call it Umbrella. Just like the symbol in the cave that we spoke about”. He signs off: “Sincerely, your life-long student, Ozwell E. Spencer.”
So Umbrella’s logo is the emblem of the four houses of Miranda’s village (Spencer in the Village guide). The letter is undated: the wiki places the meeting in 1953 by counting back those “15 years”, but no game gives the exact year, so the safe wording is “the 1950s”.
The Progenitor and the Ndipaya
The “key to evolution” comes from West Africa, from the ruins of an ancient kingdom. Resident Evil 5 tells its story in its files. The Ndipaya had an underground city and a terrible custom: their king was whoever survived the poison of a flower that grew only in the Sun Garden, the Stairway to the Sun. One of those kings, the legend says, reigned for hundreds of years. The kingdom declined and the city was abandoned (Ndipaya Tribe, added when you finish chapter 4-2).
The flower was not magic: it carried a virus. According to the wiki, the Progenitor virus is a retrovirus that is only active in the Stairway to the Sun flowers of those caverns; those who survived it gained superhuman traits, and the animals it mutated ended up destroying the city.
The discovery (1966). Spencer and Marcus become interested in the ritual after reading Henry Travis’s natural history of Africa, 72 volumes nobody took seriously (the same Travis family will later found Tricell, as the Tricell file tells). According to the wiki, Marcus and his protégé Brandon Bailey take about three months to find the garden and isolate the virus in December 1966; RE5’s chronology says that in that month Spencer, Marcus and Edward Ashford officially launch the Progenitor virus project (History of RESIDENT EVIL).
Brandon’s journal tells it from the inside: Spencer relates the legend of the flower, Marcus finds the virus, and outside Africa the flowers do not produce it (Brandon’s Journal No. 1). If they wanted the virus, they had to take the garden.
The theft. That is what they do. “In the 1960’s,” says the Ndipaya file, “a corporation went into the sacred city to find the plant used in their ceremonies and take it by force”; the tribe had to cede the Sun Garden and everything beyond it. An Umbrella foreman from the late 1960s writes that the Ndipaya were driven from the ruins “just to get this flower field”, and that diverting the groundwater is killing the flowers (Construction Supervisor’s Log). When the Ndipaya attack, Spencer orders them “removed from the equation” and they are driven off half the city; Marcus stays in Raccoon City and Brandon finishes Umbrella’s Africa research center alone in June 1969 (Brandon’s Journal No. 2).
That center is the one Chris and Sheva walk through in RE5’s chapter 5-1, forty years later: the underground garden, Umbrella’s thirty-year-old water pumps still watering the flowers (Administrator’s Log), and, in a filing cabinet, a telegram from Marcus dated 13 January 1978: “T-Virus development a success” (Telegram from James Marcus). According to Spencer’s Notebook, that secret facility is where the Progenitor was actually produced.
Brandon spends almost thirty years there, shut in with his work. After Raccoon City, Spencer closes the center and eliminates everyone with Level 10 clearance: “When one buries a treasure, one should not leave behind a map.” The attached list includes “Brandon B. - Deceased”. Brandon’s last journal, dated 16 November 1998, says that since Marcus’s death he has felt nothing and lived “like a zombie” (Research Center Director Brandon’s Journal). In 2009, Tricell’s Uroboros lab occupies those same caverns, next to the ruins you visit in chapter 4-1.
The founding (1968) and the Arklay lab
Spencer has been preparing the ground in the United States for a while. In 1962 he hires the architect George Trevor to build him a mansion in the Arklay Mountains, outside Raccoon City, full of passages and traps (History of RESIDENT EVIL). By November 1967 the mansion and the laboratory it hides are finished. What follows is told by the Resident Evil remake (2002): Trevor’s wife and daughter, Jessica and Lisa, come to visit and end up as test subjects, injected with Progenitor strains. Jessica dies as a “failure”; Lisa survives, deformed, and is kept locked up as a research subject until her death in 1998. George, who knows the mansion’s secrets, dies trapped inside.
In 1968, Spencer, Marcus and Edward Ashford found Umbrella “to mask their biological research”, according to RE5’s chronology. The wiki adds that it was in March, that it began as a pharmaceutical company and that it was funded by a secret agreement to make bioweapons for the US military. In Requiem, Grace’s final report sums up the aim Spencer declared: the “viral evolution of the human race”.
One of the three founders does not last. In July 1968 Edward Ashford dies after contracting the Progenitor (RE5’s chronology); the wiki says Spencer staged the lab accident. His son Alexander is a geneticist, not a virologist, and the Ashfords lose their place in the virus research: they are left with their own projects, far from the centre.
In August 1968 Umbrella’s executive training school opens in the Arklay Mountains, run by Marcus: a school for the company’s future researchers. The laboratory hidden under the mansion becomes Umbrella’s main bioweapons centre in the United States, until another one is built under Raccoon City itself in the 1990s. In 1969 Alexander Ashford designs and completes a base in Antarctica for his own family project, “CODE: Veronica”.
An empire. In the 1980s Umbrella grows into a multinational: Umbrella Europe, Umbrella USA headquartered in Chicago, Umbrella Japan (1987), and its own fleet to move B.O.W.s, with ships such as the Queen Zenobia and the Spencer Rain. In the early 1990s it arms itself: a private army, the U.B.C.S., under Colonel Sergei Vladimir, and a special operations team, the U.S.S. In 1994 Alfred Ashford builds a mansion and a prison on Rockfort Island, an island in the Southern Ocean that serves as a jail and training camp. Raccoon City, meanwhile, becomes its town: the company pays for the renovation of city hall and the hospital, and from 1993 the chief of police, Brian Irons, deals with it.
The Wesker Project
In the late 1960s (the wiki says 1968), Spencer and a “Dr. Wesker” start a eugenics programme: they take gifted children from all over the world, raise them in Spencer’s foundation homes so that they share his values, and give them all the same surname, Wesker. As adults they will be infected with a Progenitor strain.
Resident Evil 5 keeps the evidence. In Spencer’s mansion, the study computer shows the list of the thirteen candidates, from 001, Hans, to 013; 012 is Alex and 013 is Albert (Test Subjects). On Tricell’s ship, in chapter 6-2, a report by Umbrella’s information department dated 28 August 1998 and signed “Alex W.” declares subject No. 013, “Albert”, dead in the Arklay accident: with his death, Project W’s success rate drops to 18% (Report on Project W). Umbrella never knew he had survived.
Albert Wesker is the most famous of those children. In 1977 he joins Marcus’s school with William Birkin; in 1978, when the school closes, the two take the t-Virus research to the Arklay laboratory. In 1988, on Spencer’s orders, Wesker assassinates Marcus (the wiki adds that Birkin and a U.S.S. team were with him, and that they took his data). In 1991 he leaves research for Umbrella’s information department, and in 1996 he is captain of S.T.A.R.S., the Raccoon City police’s elite unit, which the wiki describes as Umbrella-funded. He is a spy inside the police of Umbrella’s town.
Wesker’s full story, from project child to Resident Evil 5’s villain, has its own page: Albert Wesker. Alex, the other survivor, returns in Revelations 2.
The viruses and the B.O.W.s
Umbrella calls its creatures B.O.W.s (Bio Organic Weapons). All of them come, one way or another, from the Progenitor.
The t-Virus. Marcus creates it by combining the Progenitor with leech DNA, and on 13 January 1978 he telegraphs the success to Africa (the telegram). According to the wiki, the “t-Virus Project” began in the late 1960s as a lethal weapon; from 1978 the goal becomes a virus that keeps the host alive after destroying its brain: the zombie. In 1981 they find that 10% of people are immune, and that pushes them to design creatures that hunt, such as the Hunter.
Marcus pays for his genius. After his murder in 1988, his body is dumped in the water and a colony of leeches absorbs it along with his memories: this is the Queen Leech of Resident Evil 0, which comes back in 1998 to take revenge on Umbrella.
The Tyrants. From 1988, under Birkin’s direction, the t-Virus programme looks for a perfect human soldier, the Tyrant. The problem is that only someone with extremely rare genes (one in ten million, according to the wiki) survives the process. The prototypes are the T-001 (seen in RE0) and the T-002 (the Tyrant of the first Resident Evil); by the summer of 1998 Umbrella is already mass-producing the T-103 clones, such as Resident Evil 2’s “Mr. X”.
Nemesis. Also in 1988, Umbrella Europe’s No. 6 laboratory, in France, starts the Nemesis project: an intelligent parasite, NE-α, that takes over a B.O.W.’s brain and makes it able to follow orders. In 1998 it is implanted into T-103 bodies and the Nemesis-T Type is born, which Umbrella releases in Raccoon City with one mission: to kill the S.T.A.R.S. members still alive.
The G-Virus. That same year, according to the wiki, a Nemesis parasite implanted in Lisa Trevor ends up absorbed by her body, and that opens the way to a new virus. William and Annette Birkin develop it: the G-Virus (“Golgotha”), which regenerates the body without limit and turns the host into a monster that never stops mutating, able to implant embryos in its blood relatives. In 1991 Spencer approves the project and construction begins on NEST, a huge underground laboratory under Raccoon City, finished in 1993.
T-Veronica. The Ashfords go their own way. In 1971 the “CODE: Veronica” project bears fruit: the twins Alfred and Alexia Ashford are born, genetically engineered from Veronica Ashford. Alexia is a genius: in 1981 she graduates from university at ten. She combines the Progenitor with the retrovirus of a queen ant and creates T-Veronica. In 1982 she injects it into her father, Alexander, who turns into a monster (the “Nosferatu”); in December 1983 she injects herself and enters a fifteen-year cryogenic sleep. The world is told she is dead.
Wesker’s virus. In 1998 Wesker injects himself with a strain Birkin gave him: it puts him into a temporary death and revives him with superhuman strength and speed. Eleven years later, in RE5, he depends on exact doses of a serum to keep it under control, PG67A/W.
1998: Arklay, Raccoon City, Rockfort and Antarctica
In a single year, Umbrella loses almost everything.
Arklay. In May 1998 the t-Virus leaks in the Arklay laboratory (in Resident Evil 0 it is the Queen Leech’s sabotage). Staff and animals turn into zombies and creatures, and the first victims turn up in the mountains. On 23 July the police send S.T.A.R.S.’s Bravo Team; its helicopter goes down, and the rookie Rebecca Chambers and the escaped prisoner Billy Coen make their way through an Umbrella train full of the dead and Marcus’s old school, where they kill the Queen Leech. Wesker and Birkin watch it all on the cameras.
On 24 July Alpha Team goes in: Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton and their captain, Wesker. Mutant dogs drive them into the Spencer Mansion. Inside they find Bravo dead one by one and, under the house, Umbrella’s laboratory. Wesker is the traitor: his orders were to bring S.T.A.R.S. there to test the B.O.W.s against real soldiers and then destroy the lab. He releases the Tyrant, which runs him through with its claw. Chris, Jill, Barry, Rebecca and the pilot Brad Vickers escape by helicopter as the mansion blows up. Wesker, thanks to Birkin’s virus, gets up in the lab and leaves; Colonel Vladimir has already taken the incident’s data.
Raccoon City. Nobody believes S.T.A.R.S., and in August the unit is disbanded. In September Birkin plans to defect to the US military with the G-Virus. On the night of 22–23 September, a U.S.S. team raids his laboratory to take it; Birkin, fatally wounded, injects himself with the G-Virus, kills the team and, in the chaos, the t-Virus reaches the sewers. The rats carry it into the city’s water. Within a week Raccoon City is a graveyard, and on 1 October a US government missile wipes it off the map. The Raccoon City page tells it all.
Umbrella does not just watch: it sends its private army, a Tyrant to recover the G-Virus and Nemesis to hunt down what is left of S.T.A.R.S. Spencer sums it up in his notebook: “Raccoon City has been wiped out. The Americans finally took action against us… they will blame Umbrella for Raccoon City’s annihilation… over 100,000 of their own people” (Spencer’s Notebook). In Requiem, the report on the incident recalls the same dates: the September leak and the “sterilization” of 1 October (Report on the Raccoon City Incident).
Sheena Island. In November 1998 another Umbrella town falls: Sheena Island, an island that looked like a company town and hid a Tyrant factory. Its commander, Vincent Goldman, releases the t-Virus on his own people when he discovers a spy, Ark Thompson, sent by Leon (Resident Evil Survivor).
Rockfort and Antarctica. In December, Claire Redfield, looking for her brother Chris, raids Umbrella’s Paris offices, is captured and sent to the prison on Rockfort Island, Alfred Ashford’s domain. On 27 December an air and ground attack by Wesker’s organisation (the H.C.F.) releases the t-Virus on the island. Claire escapes with another prisoner, the young Steve Burnside, to the Antarctic base, which is overrun too. There the dying Alfred wakes the real Alexia from her fifteen-year sleep. Alexia infects Steve, who dies saving Claire. Chris arrives, runs into a living, superhuman Wesker hunting for T-Veronica, and kills Alexia before escaping with Claire as the base blows up. Wesker takes Steve’s body (Code: Veronica).
The fall (1998–2004) and the trials
After Raccoon City, the world does not know what happened. The US government denies for years that B.O.W.s exist, and survivors’ accounts are treated as conspiracy theories. But it is the paperwork that sinks Umbrella: according to the wiki, Congress suspends Umbrella USA’s right to do business and federalises its assets, and the Raccoon Trials begin, lasting until 2003, with false witnesses and an Umbrella that blames the government.
Spencer writes in his notebook that, after Raccoon City, the company is “nothing but a tool” for further Progenitor research (Spencer’s Notebook). Umbrella moves its real base to a chemical plant in the Caucasus, bought after Raccoon City through a shell company. Meanwhile, its employees start selling everything:
- In the summer of 2002, a South American drug lord, Javier Hidalgo, buys T-Veronica from a source in the old Umbrella (according to the wiki, Wesker); Leon and Jack Krauser put an end to him on their first mission together (Darkside Chronicles).
- In September 2002, a former executive, Morpheus D. Duvall, steals the t-Virus and a t+G hybrid from the Paris lab, hijacks the liner Spencer Rain and threatens the United States and China with missiles (Dead Aim).
The Caucasus (February 2003). Chris and Jill, who have been running their own anti-Umbrella team since 1999, follow reports of monster attacks to a Caucasus village and the company’s last stronghold: Vladimir’s chemical plant. They destroy its Tyrant, the T-A.L.O.S. In parallel, Wesker slips in, kills Vladimir, downloads all of Umbrella’s data from its artificial intelligence and wipes it (Umbrella Chronicles).
The verdict. Wesker hands excerpts of that archive to the US courts. “In 2003, Umbrella was found guilty on all charges,” says RE5’s BSAA file. A consortium of pharmaceutical companies saves itself by giving prosecutors evidence against Umbrella in exchange for immunity, and then funds an alliance to curb the black-market B.O.W. trade: the BSAA, founded by eleven people, among them Chris and Jill. An anonymous witness (Wesker) points at Spencer, and the United States and Russia issue an international arrest warrant for him. Spencer hides in his mansion in Europe.
The company crumbles. According to the wiki, its last branch, Umbrella Japan, goes into liquidation in March 2004 because nobody buys it. Requiem gives 2004 as the year of the bankruptcy (Report on the Raccoon City Incident); the earlier games speak of the conviction and bankruptcy in 2003. Both fit: guilty in 2003, gone for good in 2004.
What survives. Wesker keeps the data and gives it to Excella Gionne of Tricell, who goes on to run Tricell Africa and reopens Umbrella’s African facility (Excella’s file). And in Requiem, a t-Virus researcher who idolised Spencer, Victor Gideon, skips the trials and disappears (Report on Victor Gideon).
When Leon reaches Spain in the autumn of 2004 (Resident Evil 4), Umbrella no longer exists, but its ghost does: in the knife duel of chapter 5-3, Krauser tells Leon he took Ashley “for Umbrella’s sake”, to get the Las Plagas sample.
Spencer’s end (2006)
Spencer, in hiding, is no longer after the evolution of the species but something smaller: not dying. The files of RE5’s Lost in Nightmares episode, in his study, tell it. Ravaged by age, he seeks immortality through the virus’s effect on telomeres and pins his hopes on Alex, “the last of my children” (Spencer’s Memoirs 1). Alex takes hundreds of test subjects to an isolated island and a month later asks for more (Memoirs 2). A year goes by, thousands of subjects, no results; Spencer’s organs fail and machines keep him alive (Memoirs 3). At last a success is reported, and Alex vanishes with the researchers, the subjects and the virus. “I should have learned from my mistakes with Albert!” Only his butler, Patrick, is left (Memoirs 4).
Patrick follows orders to the end. A week earlier, on Spencer’s orders, he injected the prisoners in the basement with the virus: “they are no longer human” (Patrick’s Memoirs 2). They are the Blobs of the prison Chris and Jill walk through. And Spencer had him leak his whereabouts to Wesker through an informant working for a female spy who dealt with him; the man was “Roberto or Ricardo” (Patrick’s Memoirs 3), who in RE5 is Ricardo Irving.
August 2006. Wesker reaches the mansion. Spencer, dying, tells him the truth: the Wesker Project, the children raised with that surname, and that he was one of its subjects. According to the wiki, he lies that Albert is the only survivor. He also explains his goal: forcing human evolution with a virus and becoming a god himself (Albert Wesker’s file). Wesker kills him. It is the memory that closes RE5’s chapter 4-1 and opens chapter 6-1.
The BSAA gets the tip-off and sends Chris and Jill to arrest Spencer. They find him dead and Wesker standing over him. After the fight (Albert Wesker in Lost in Nightmares), Jill hurls herself at Wesker through a window and the two fall over the cliff. She is declared dead (Jill’s file). Umbrella’s last founder dies at the hands of one of his own “children”.
Umbrella’s legacy
Umbrella ended in 2004, but its work lives on in almost everything that comes after.
- On the black market. Its samples and its data change hands: Tricell and Wesker’s Uroboros in RE5 come from its data, and according to the wiki the T-Veronica research ends up in RE6’s C-Virus. RE6 has a Neo-Umbrella (the file), but it has nothing to do with the company: it is Carla Radames’s terrorist group, which only borrows the name (the bioterrorism era).
- The blue Umbrella. In 2007, according to the wiki, Umbrella USA’s assets are reorganised into a new company, with former staff the government trusts and the logo in blue “as atonement”. It makes anti-B.O.W. research and gear. In RE7, Chris arrives at the end with it, and a Not a Hero file introduces it: a private military company that took the name to atone for the past and stop bioweapon makers (Letter Regarding Umbrella’s Goals). Its story continues on the Mold page.
Requiem spoiler: the rest of this section reveals Requiem’s true ending.
Spencer’s last project. Requiem returns to Raccoon City in 2026 and tells what Spencer hid under it. On 22 April 1980 Spencer signs a four-step roadmap: the Wesker Project and the t-Virus; ARK, a secret laboratory under the city, as command centre; the development of Elpis; and memory transfer. In the 1980s ARK raises cloned children in the Raccoon City Orphanage and injects them with Spencer’s plasma so that they inherit his memories; the experiment fails. Elpis is finished in the mid-1990s, locked behind a password only Spencer knows. Everyone who hunts for it believes it is a weapon.
The Connections inside Umbrella. Requiem reveals that the syndicate from RE7 and Village was there from the start: in 1986 one of its fronts donates 30 million dollars to Marcus, and after his death Brandon Bailey is its contact. In 1998 they secure ARK and lobby for Raccoon City to be bombed, so that “the blame will fall solely on Spencer” and they can take Umbrella’s assets (Access Log: First Assembly Minutes). For 28 years they use ARK as their bioweapons factory: in chapter 13 Leon finds crates from H.C.F., Tricell and Umbrella, and a catalogue selling a Tyrant T-501 for 120 million and a Nemesis-γ mass-produced from Umbrella’s parasite (Product Catalog 2). At the trials, Grace’s report says, it was Wesker who testified against Spencer.
A different Spencer. In his last years Spencer agrees to a single interview, with the journalist Alyssa Ashcroft, a Raccoon City survivor. He shows her a baby he has adopted, Grace, and says his research “opened Pandora’s box”. Alyssa finds him “more rational than expected. A ‘pure’ scientist… Anger? Regret?” (Alyssa’s Interview Notes). When Spencer dies, his will names Alyssa as Grace’s guardian (Letter from Patrick).
In chapter 15, Grace opens Elpis and finds out what it was: an antiviral that neutralises the Progenitor family of viruses, the t-Virus and the G-Virus included. The man who paid for the t-Virus left the cure hidden; a message of his summed it up: “Tricell, H.C.F., The Family, and Umbrella. Elpis shall bring it all to an end.” Requiem leaves the question open: according to Grace’s report, “most testimonies describe him as nothing but a senile old man” and his true intentions “will forever remain unknown”. Zeno, of The Connections, claims Spencer died because he defied them; the game does not confirm it.
The full story of ARK, Elpis and Grace is on the Requiem page.