Improve Resident Evil's tags

Question

Recently I posted a question about the Resident Evil 1 Remake, but I got a bit confused about which tag to use. Initially I've used resident-evil, but later I realize that I should use resident-evil-2002 instead.

And, out of curiosity, I took a look in Resident Evil's tags and I realized how confusing they are.

Resident Evil 1:

We have resident-evil for the original game from 1996, and resident-evil-2002 for the remake.

Resident Evil 2:

We have resident-evil-2-1998 for the original game from 1998, and resident-evil-2 for the remake, the opposite nomenclature of the first game.

Resident Evil 3:

We have resident-evil-nemesis for the original game from 1999, and resident-evil-3 for the remake, now neither of the two tags has the year in it.

Resident Evil 4:

We have resident-evil-4 for the original game from 2005, and resident-evil-4-remake for the remake.

Every game that had a remake has its own pattern for the tags, which makes all of them confusing. In Do we need Resident Evil 2 - Remake tag?, Wipqozn said:

I highly doubt we're going to suddenly find ourselves overrun with questions for the original, so might as well use the shorter tag for the more recent game.

And I totally agree, my suggestion is to follow Resident Evil 2 pattern and rename the tags this way:

• resident-evil-1996 for the original, and resident-evil for the remake
• Resident Evil 2 tags don't change
• resident-evil-3-1999 for the original, and resident-evil-3 for the remake
• resident-evil-4-2005 for the original, and resident-evil-4 for the remake

Answer 1

I agree, this is a bit of a mess. Normally we prefer to just add the year of release to the newest release/version of the game, but I agree with galacticninja that this would be a case where having the year of release across all tags would make it a lot clearer moving forward.

I've gone ahead and made these changes, similar to what galacticninja proposed but with extra synonyms for the remake versions as well:

Main tag	Synonyms	Tag Wiki
resident-evil-1996	resident-evil	Yes
resident-evil-2-1998	resident-evil-2	Yes
resident-evil-3-nemesis	resident-evil-3, resident-evil-nemesis	No
resident-evil-4-2005	resident-evil-4	Yes
resident-evil-2002	resident-evil-remake, resident-evil-2015-remaster, resident-evil-hd-remaster	Yes
resident-evil-2-2019	resident-evil-2-remake	Yes
resident-evil-3-2020	resident-evil-3-remake	No
resident-evil-4-2023	resident-evil-4-remake	No

This should help to disambiguate the tags and make it easier on everyone to find what they're looking for. If anyone wants to add some tag excerpts/wikis for the tags that lack them, please do! :)

Answer 2

As discussed in the previous meta posts, “How to handle multiple games with the same exact name?” (2012) and “Are we making new tags for duplicate game names hard(er) to use?” (2016), the community consensus is that the tag for a newer game that shares its name with an older game should have the year of release appended.

The top-voted answers on these posts differ on whether the older game’s tag should also have a year appended. I prefer the tagging policy suggested by the older meta post, which is to append the year to both games’ tags.

This way, there is no confusion about which tag should be used for which game, even without looking at the tag wikis. Also, we wouldn’t need to retag if the game gets remade again in the future.

For example, resident-evil-1996 (original) and resident-evil-2002 (remake). And if it gets remade again in 2024 and is still named Resident Evil, the tag for that game would be resident-evil-2024.

Note that the 2002 remake was remastered in 2015 — Resident Evil HD Remaster. On some services, such as Steam, this version of the game is listed as "Resident Evil", with no "HD Remaster". To avoid further confusion about this, we should add tag synonyms pointing the 2015 remaster to the 2002 remake.

We should use the official spelling of the game name in the tags whenever possible, so the tag for the 1999 game should be resident-evil-3-nemesis to reflect the game's official name, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. I feel that the "1999" year suffix is not necessary here since the 2020 remake is named "Resident Evil 3", with no "Nemesis".

As per the above, here are my suggestions:

Original	Synonym* to original	Remake	Synonym to remake
resident-evil-1996	resident-evil	resident-evil-2002	resident-evil-remake resident-evil-2015 resident-evil-hd-remaster
resident-evil-2-1998	resident-evil-2	resident-evil-2-2019	resident-evil-2-remake
resident-evil-3-nemesis	resident-evil-3 resident-evil-nemesis	resident-evil-3-2020	resident-evil-3-remake
resident-evil-4-2005	resident-evil-4	resident-evil-4-2023	resident-evil-4-remake

* As arghtype suggested in the comments, we could make resident-evil a synonym for resident-evil-1996. I think blacklisting it (and showing appropriate tag usage guidance) would be better so that the user will be required to specify which game they're referring to, as is the case for minecraft: "Should we add [minecraft] to the tag blacklist?".

The community managers will have to implement this change, which might take some time. Until then, we should follow arghtype’s advice and make resident-evil a synonym of resident-evil-1996; the same thing with the sequels.