Do you ever think about how absolutely idiotic the Umbrella Corporation is

So these guys were founded in the 1960s by Ozwell E. Spencer because he learned about a flower in Africa that contained the Progenitor virus, which supposedly bestowed superhuman abilities, and he wanted to use that to create a race of advanced beings because eugenics

The only problem was that the chances of getting those abilities were extremely rare; most people died when exposed to the virus. So Spencer and his eugenicist pals Edward Ashford and James Marcus founded Umbrella Pharmaceuticals purely to fund research into this flower

For the next two decades, these clowns spent millions upon millions of dollars creating mutated strains of the virus, one of which is the T-Virus most people are familiar with. They were hoping to find practical military applications for the virus to generate more funds

To raise even more money, Umbrella expanded into various legitimate businesses, primarily pharmaceuticals but also into firearms, cosmetics, health foods, industrial equipment and even luxury cruise liners (yes, really)

They became one of the biggest corporations on the face of the Earth, pulling in ungodly amounts of money, all to try to learn more about a flower that they couldn't find any way to actually use as intended

Even though the flower didn't work and they couldn't replicate it outside of Africa (samples cultivated in non-native soil didn't contain the virus), they were so determined to create superhumans that the company pulled off miraculous feats of science and promptly ignored them

For example: Umbrella perfected human cloning back in 1971. Edward's son, Alexander, cloned his great-great-grandmother Veronica to create Alexia Ashford, a super-genius and perfect replica of Veronica. This cloning process was never licensed or capitalized on

: @meloramylin

One of Umbrella's major products, Aqua Cure, is capable of healing grievous wounds just from a quick application of ointment, and yet has seemingly not revolutionized or even impacted the health care industry in any significant way

Lisa Trevor, an Umbrella test subject they abducted as a child, was injected with numerous viruses and parasites. She somehow survived all the experiments, her unique physiology making her essentially indestructible. Umbrella never tried to replicate her cells

Marcus created a mutated Queen Leech using the T-Virus that entered his brain after he was murdered by Umbrella (we'll get back to that) and managed to resurrect him. Even though it was an accident, yes, Umbrella technically even brought people back from the dead

But literally none of this mattered to Spencer or the Umbrella executives because they were too obsessed with this stupid flower. To get it to work, they experimented with mutated virus strains, and thus began the company's work on Bio-Organic Weapons, also known as B.O.W.s

B.O.W.s are genetically engineered creatures designed to be used in combat. They were intended to be sold to militaries. However, almost every single B.O.W. that Umbrella created was completely ineffective as a combat tool

While injecting or splicing the T-Virus into various creatures did make them more dangerous, it also decreased their intelligence, meaning they couldn't interpret commands or be relied on to not turn on their handlers

They injected the T-Virus into anything they could get their hands on. Humans, dogs, monkeys, frogs, cockroaches, plants, snakes, sharks, you name it. Aside from the dogs, all of them were deemed failures because they couldn't be trained and would just attack anything that moved

Umbrella's only arguably successful B.O.W. projects were the Hunter line, human embryos crossed with either reptilian or amphibian DNA that could be properly trained by their handlers, and the Tyrants, which were giant mutated humans that could interpret complex commands

However, Tyrants were subject to numerous design flaws. Firstly, the necessary genetic make-up to mutate into a Tyrant was, you guessed it, extremely rare: one in ten million. So it was almost impossible to find test subjects, and they weren't guaranteed to survive the process

One of Umbrella's own officers, Sergei Vladimir, was determined to be compatible, so they took clones of him to make Tyrants. Again, they perfected the process of cloning human beings and never bothered to tell anyone or try to make money off it

The other issue with Tyrants is that they wouldn't stop mutating after being released from their incubation tubes, deteriorating their brain functions. They also had organs grafted to the outside of their flesh, because why not have an easily exploitable weak point in combat?

To mitigate this, Umbrella had to install Power Limiters into the Tyrants, or else they would just mutate themselves to death. Even then, these Power Limiters would often malfunction or be destroyed during combat, because of course they did

The first Tyrant to be deployed in combat was the T-002, which was released by Albert Wesker, who wanted the Tyrant to kill Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. Instead, the Tyrant promptly killed Wesker (he got better)

The T-103 model actually seemed to understand commands, but in every known instance of its use, it failed to complete its mission. Six were deployed into Raccoon City during the mass outbreak of the T-Virus and all of them were prematurely destroyed

You have to wonder how much of an ego blow it was to create “the ultimate Bio-Organic Weapon” and then have them all be destroyed by regular cops or even just civilians with basic firearms training

That's not even getting into how often Umbrella assassinated their own people, to the point that it's bizarre that anyone would continue working for them

We already mentioned Marcus, who was betrayed by William Birkin and Albert Wesker, but Birkin himself was similarly betrayed and shot by Umbrella's operatives when they wanted his G-Virus research. He probably should have seen that coming, to be honest

To be fair, Birkin was planning on leaving Umbrella and selling the G-Virus to the United States military because he was pissed that he wasn't promoted to the executive board. After being shot, he injected himself with the G-Virus and turned into a giant monster, because why not

Oh, and Spencer also had Edward Ashford assassinated back in the 60s and made his death look like a lab accident, seemingly only because he wanted to consolidate power within the company

The betrayals of Marcus and Birkin were directly responsible for the T-Virus outbreak in the Arklay Mountains and the T-Virus outbreak in Raccoon City respectively, meaning that Umbrella did themselves in not once but twice

The T-Virus outbreaks resulted in the deaths of numerous Umbrella employees and untold amounts of damage to Umbrella's properties and research data, not to mention the eventual destruction of Raccoon City itself by nuclear missile by order of the United States government

Imagine doing your job so badly that the President of the United States has to nuke a city on US soil to put a stop to your shenanigans

Note how exactly none of this wound up helping them do any research into the flower, which was the only reason the entire stupid company was founded. This was purely Umbrella's incompetence biting them in the ass

Yet somehow they made the Raccoon City Incident blow up in their faces even more before the end. Not only was an entire city with a population of over 100,000 people now being ravaged by the undead because of them, they also decided now was the time to field test some B.O.W.s

The aforementioned Tyrants were sent into the city on various missions (again, all of which failed) but they also unleashed other B.O.W.s on the populace purely to test their combat viability. During the middle of a zombie pandemic

This resulted in many members of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service, mercenaries who were ostensibly sent into the city to evacuate civilians, getting killed by their own B.O.W.s, which was seen as acceptable so long as they could obtain combat data from the encounters

They also sent in the Nemesis T-Type, a modified T-103 Tyrant that was implanted with the NE-α parasite, which prevented mental degradation so the host would retain human-level intelligence and the ability to use weapons. Basically they wanted him to have a rocket launcher

Nemesis was given the mission of hunting down members of the Special Tactics and Rescue Service (STARS, for short), a unit of the Raccoon City Police Department that had discovered the Arklay Mountain outbreak and were aware of Umbrella's complicity

Five members of STARS survived the Arklay Mountain Incident: Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, Rebecca Chambers and Brad Vickers. Albert Wesker doesn't count in this context because he was secretly an Umbrella operative and was thought to be dead at the time

The surviving STARS members had tried to warn the public about Umbrella's actions, but they were largely ignored or had their revelations covered up by people in local government who were in Umbrella's pocket, including their own boss, police chief Brian Irons

So even though nobody paid all that much attention to STARS's warnings, apparently Umbrella was still mad at them enough to build a super monster and give it the specific mission to hunt down and kill them all anyway. That was Nemesis's sole objective

Except, there's only one problem: they sent it to Raccoon City, when at the time of the incident, only two STARS members were actually in the city: Jill and Brad. Meaning Nemesis could only feasibly come into contact with 40% of its intended hit-list

They created this thing to kill exactly five people and sent it to a location where it would only be able to find two of them

In the original version of RE3, Nemesis kills Brad in front of Jill. In the remake, the zombies get Brad, meaning that Nemesis in the new canon is just as completely ineffective at accomplishing his missions as any other Tyrant in the series

In both versions, Jill destroys Nemesis and escapes the city before its destruction. As well, rookie cop Leon Kennedy and civilian Claire Redfield take down numerous B.O.W.s and destroy one of the T-103 Tyrants and Birkin's mutated G-Virus form before escaping an Umbrella lab

Meaning that all of Umbrella's operations during the city's outbreak and dozens if not hundreds of their B.O.W.s have been wiped out by one STARS member and a couple normal folks who were in active combat basically for the first time

If anything proves how completely useless most of Umbrella's projects are, it's the Raccoon City Incident. Virtually all of their B.O.W.s are either malfunctioning prototypes, accidental mutations or outright failures

These morons had built working handheld railguns before the end of the 90s and instead of just mass-producing those and selling them to the highest bidder, they keep injecting the T-Virus into random animals to see what sticks

Especially since creating marketable B.O.W.s was not their end goal, it was just the money-making scheme that they were fanatically obsessed with beyond all reason. All of their money and resources were really in service of Project W, their superhuman research project

Project W adopted hundreds of kids from around the world and indoctrinated them with Spencer's eugenicist worldview, giving them world-class educations and grooming them to be injected with the Progenitor virus (from the flower) to see if they would get superpowers

For some reason they were also all given the surname Wesker, which probably would've been a little weird if they were the advanced superior race and needed to presumably start marrying and having kids but whatever clearly Umbrella didn't put much thought into any of this

From that group of hundreds, thirteen were chosen as the "best of the best" who would actually be injected with the virus. Of those, ELEVEN died. Meaning all this time, money and energy they spent on these kids resulted in only two of them successfully bonding with the virus

Even worse, the only one who actually got superhuman powers out of the deal was Albert Wesker. The other survivor, Alex Wesker, had a pre-existing terminal disease that cancelled out her superpowers. So all this work produced only one viable success

A viable success who wasn't even actually loyal to Umbrella or Spencer. In fact, after being “killed” by the Tyrant during the Arklay Mountain Incident (he survived because of his superpowers), Albert betrayed Umbrella and went into business for himself

While he still hated STARS, he also caused another T-Virus outbreak on Rockfort Island, one of Umbrella's last remaining facilities, three months after the destruction of Raccoon City. Umbrella was already bleeding cash, and now the one superhuman they made was against them

For five years after the destruction of Raccoon City, Umbrella fought a protracted legal battle with the US government over their alleged complicity in causing the outbreak, only for Wesker himself to submit evidence that led to them losing the case in 2003

So again, the one guy they managed to make a superhuman did everything in his power to absolutely bury this company

Umbrella was hit with countless lawsuits for what happened in Raccoon City and went into bankruptcy, when they easily could have avoided all of it by not wasting decades on dead-end viral weaponry and just sold one of their five or six scientific miracles

Alex Wesker was supposedly more loyal to Spencer, but in fact was secretly planning a betrayal of him as well. After Umbrella went bankrupt, Spencer pooled his remaining cash into Alex's research into a mutagen that would supposedly stop the aging process

Unlike their other projects, this one never actually saw completion, both because Alex was having difficulty making it work and because she felt she was running out of time to live and so abandoned Spencer to work on saving herself

She had become obsessed with another virus, the T-Phobos virus, and with digitizing her consciousness to be implanted in a host body without her terminal illness. She apparently was also hoping to get her superhuman powers in her new body

Albert would end up reuniting with Spencer, who was by this point very old and close to death, waxing poetic about how he was supposed to be a god who created an advanced race of superior beings with the Progenitor virus, only for Wesker to kill him by impaling him in the chest

Albert and Alex, the sole viable creations of Umbrella's principal reason for existing, would then embark on individual world domination schemes, transforming themselves into monsters with the Uroboros virus

Both of them would also end up being killed with rocket launchers

And that's it.
That's the legacy of the Umbrella Corporation.
All because of some flowers.