The History of Devil May Cry

It began as Resident Evil 4, and founded a genre by being rejected.

In 1999, Capcom asked Hideki Kamiya, fresh off directing Resident Evil 2, to build a fourth Resident Evil for the PlayStation 2. What his team, Team Little Devils, made was too fast, too acrobatic and too proud of its own fighting to be survival horror. Producer Shinji Mikami told them to make it its own game instead. Rewritten around Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and released on August 23, 2001, Devil May Cry effectively founded the character action genre: games graded not on survival, but on style.

What followed is one of the cleanest arcs in the medium. A sequel made by a different team stumbled in 2003; its rescue director, Hideaki Itsuno, demanded a third game of his own and delivered the series' defining entry in 2005; and after a reboot detour by a British studio, the original line returned in 2019 with its best-selling game. Every main entry has sold over a million copies for Capcom.

THE ERAS

Twenty-five years in four moves

2001 · The original

Capcom Production Studio 4 and Team Little Devils. Dante, Trish, Mallet Island, Mundus. Metacritic 94, more than 2.16 million copies, and a new subgenre, called character action or Extreme Combat, dates itself from this game.

2003 · The stumble

Devil May Cry 2 was handed to Capcom Production Studio 1, an arcade-bred team, without Kamiya. Its first director remains unidentified in the credits to this day; Itsuno was brought in with only months left. It sold well and reviewed at 68, and the team stayed to answer for it.

2005 · The redemption

Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, a prequel directed by Itsuno from the start: four fighting styles, a living Vergil, and difficulty so severe in the West that the 2006 Special Edition had to rebalance it. Combined, the two versions sold over 2.3 million copies.

2008 to 2019 · The long road

Devil May Cry 4 introduced Nero in 2008. DmC: Devil May Cry (2013), by Ninja Theory, branched into an alternate universe. Devil May Cry 5 (2019) reunited Dante, Nero and the newcomer V, and became the series' best seller, at roughly 10 million copies by the end of 2024.

THE NUMBERS

The record, kept plainly

38 million

Copies sold across the series by December 31, 2025, per Capcom's count as carried in the series record. Every installment is a Capcom Platinum Title, the company's marker for a million seller.

94, 68, 87

The Metacritic arc of the PlayStation 2 trilogy on its home console: a landmark, a disappointment, and a redemption, in that order. Few trilogies wear their production history so openly in their scores.

Two animated series

Madhouse's canonical anime ran 12 episodes in 2007. A separate Netflix series, produced by Adi Shankar with Studio Mir, premiered April 3, 2025. The franchise also spans novels, manga, stage plays and a cancelled Hollywood film.

How it began as Resident Evil 4 The sequel that stumbled How the third game saved it

The History of Devil May Cry

THE ERAS

THE NUMBERS

THE FIRST WORD