The Umbrella Corporation
Founded in 1968, the Umbrella Corporation is the international enterprise and leading pharmaceutical company that specializes in health products such as: chemicals, health foods, cosmetics, industrial machine production, medical products, healthcare, consumer products, transportation and tourism. Unknown to some of its employees, the products they sell was to fund illegal activities such a military operations and viral weaponry.
Soon after opening The Umbrella Pharmaceuticals, profits were used to create bioweapon warfare to militaries around the world. This was to go against the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention which prohibited the kind of viruses that Umbrella manufactured. Umbrella was able to cover their true intensions by researching and developing vaccines to the viruses they were developing.
Umbrella had a number of other subsidiaries that included Umbrella Medical Equipment, as well as Umbrella Industries which was responsible for the development of anti-B.O.W. weaponry. Their tourism firm, the Paraguas Line Company, earned revenue from transporting passengers across the Atlantic as a front for the transporting of viral weapon samples from West Africa.
Umbrella's true goals wasn't to become a worldwide monopoly in the pharmaceutical industry, but eugenics. Corporate executives real intension was to create the Wesker Project, which to them was to birth a new advanced race of human beings using viruses to advance the human condition through strength, and education. Umbrella wanted a human race they can rule as gods. The project wasn't realized until 1998 with loss of two of their candidates.
In 2003, the Umbrella Corporation had gone bankrupt by the trials following the virus outbreak of Raccoon City, that destroyed the city. The corporation was found guilty which the verdict caused the company to go bankrupt that made their subsidiaries to go under within the next year. The orchestrators of the fall of Umbrella was the United States Government and The Connections, seizing their assets.
The Beginnings (The 1960s)
The origins of Umbrella Corporation stated with the eugenics movement that dominated both Europe and North America in the early 1900s. Founded by three university students that studied together Oswell E. Spencer, Edward Ashford, and Dr. James Marcus. They were virologist figures in the eugenics movement. Spencer was a student from Mother Miranda, who learned that the human body can be advanced and transformed using an agent such as the Mold. Spencer discovered the symbol of Umbrella while studying at Miranda's Eastern European village, he saw the four houses which would later become inspiration for Umbrella.
It all started in 1966 when Dr. Marcus took a trip to West Africa at the Ndipaya tribal land and discovered an underground garden with a flower called the Stairway Of The Sun. He also discovered that the flowers contained a mutagenic virus. The flowers cultivated in the United States failed to replicate the virus. Requiring significant funding beyond their aristocratic links to bring about their eugenics dream, Spencer formed Umbrella Pharmaceuticals on behalf of Ashford and an indifferent Marcus and established a base in the Ndipaya garden so Progenitor samples could be transported over the Atlantic instead. The three founders of Umbrella later decided to develop the T-Virus Project by developing strains of the Progenitor Virus to sell the United States military for usage as a weapon, but the project required extra money and funding.
The T-Virus Project expanded considerably over this period thanks to research led by Dr. William Birkin at the end of the 1970s, inspired by Marcus' independent but otherwise unrelated work in 1978, which saw the abandonment of t-Virus as a weapon of death and instead utilized its mutagenic properties to keep the infected alive in a mentally-damaged, homicidal and cannibalistic state capable of maintaining activity after cardiac arrest.
1968 - The 1990s
The Umbrella Corporation had been growing in power. The founding fathers of Umbrella had a fallout, where Edward Ashford was the first victim of the T-Virus prototype masterminded by Spencer. In 1988, Dr. James Marcus would be the next victim, due to the unpopularity with the executives because of Marcus's usage of executive trainees as guinea pigs. He was executed. The son of Edward Ashford, Alexander Ashford, wasn't a virologist, but instead he was irrelevant to Umbrella projects. However, his genetically engineered twin sister, Alexia restored the family prestige. Both Alexia and Alexander became infected with the experimental T-Veronica Virus, vanished from public life and presumed dead. Alexander survived the infection, and later became part of the administration. The Ashford family was no longer a threat to Spencer.
With the realization of a rare immunity to the T-Virus Project, the project expanded in the 1980s as labs across the globe developed chimeric animals that would be carried out by militaries around the world using Bio-Organic Weapons (B.O.W.). The Umbrella Corporation had grown so large that it required to open subsidiaries to handle their operations. Umbrella USA held their operations and administrations in Chicago, Illinois. The Arklay laboratory facility will then be the primary location for bio-weapons research until the opening of the NEST in 1991 so they can do research on the more advanced G-Virus. The G-Virus is a Progenitor strain capable of repairing dead tissue and could transform humans into super beings just as Spencer had dreamed of.
Umbrella Europe was founded in the 1980s out of partial branches in Western Europe out of frustrations of Umbrella USA's influence of its research. Umbrella Europe pioneered the Nemesis Project, which is an intelligent parasite to replacement brain to go around Umbrella USA's failures to prevent the T-Virus to cause brain damage and loss of intelligence. This plan by Umbrella Europe alongside Umbrella USA to develop the Tyrant Virus, as a super human weapon to be integrated in 1998 to create the Nemesis T-Type as a European achievement. Umbrella USA's counter to the Nemesis T-Type was the development of the Talos Project, which is a computer organic link so it could pilot the Tyrant instead.
Besides Umbrella USA and Umbrella Europe was Umbrella Japan, which would engineer their research into machinery and biotechnology in 1987. By the end of the 80s decade, Umbrella Japan would acquire new ships: The Queen Zenobia, The Queen Dido, The Queen Semiramis, and the newly bought Spencer Rain to transport bioweaponry overseas. Planes would also be used to transport cargo to the Antarctic Transport Terminal. That is a facility that opened in the 1960s for the Ashford's' research but would be almost solely used as an international shipping depot following the disappearance of Dr. Alexia Ashford in 1983. Umbrella USA oversaw the most successful sectors of Umbrella, with a third of Raccoon City's 100,000 inhabitants working for its subsidiaries active there.
Due to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Umbrella allowed to expand its paramilitary organizations, the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service and Umbrella Security Service, as well as the Umbrella Intelligence Division and its Monitors, with the U.B.C.S. founded with the contracting of mercenary work from Communist guerrilla fighters and nationalist terrorists arrested soon after the collapse, and retired soldiers from the Warsaw Pact states. In 1994, Alfred Ashford set up a boot camp on Rockfort Island for anti B.O.W. training. Its military expansion from this point is linked with the U.B.C.S.' founder and commanding officer, Colonel Sergei Vladimir, whose special genes gave Umbrella USA an opportunity to finally mass-produce the Tyrant line by experimenting on his clones. By 1998 Umbrella had an imposing air arm, consisting of UH-60 Black Hawks; AH-6 Little Birds; CH-53 Sea Stallions; AV-8 Harrier jets, and C-130 Hercules water-landing planes. Its ground forces were armed with M4A1 rifles and MP5 submachine guns, with the USS equipped with British-made S10 gas masks. Umbrella had successfully implanted moles within the US military, such as Dr. Albert Wesker, and learned of American ambitions to eventually abandon support for Umbrella with the reactivation of their own bioweapons program. Umbrella's influence over the nations it was selling arms to was nonetheless still strong, to the extent that when No.57 Plant in West Africa suffered an outbreak, the U.B.C.S.' massacre of everyone in the nearby town was covered up by the government, and a case of human experimentation gone horribly wrong at a hospital in the Arklay Mountains ended with no police investigation and the media failing to identify Umbrella to the incident and the hospital simply closed in 1993. A news reporter who investigated the case was murdered in 1996 and his body dumped in the nearby Aimes River, with no follow-up investigation to link him to the case.
Raccoon City - 1998
Umbrella's success was starting to decline in 1998, due to industrial espionage and internal destabilization. By 1998, Umbrella USA was invaded by a Chinese spy, Ada Wong, working for a rival company. In B.O.W. research, and through a relationship with the Arklay Laboratory's new chief of research, Dr. John Clemens, gathered information on current projects along with limited information on Birkin's G-Virus, which the company soon developed an interest for.
The beginning of Umbrella decline started in the Arklay Laboratory in May 1998 due to a containment failure. The reason for this failure is still unknown, but an experimental sentient B.O.W. developed by Dr. James Marcus a decade earlier before known as the Queen Leech. The facility was put on lockdown, but their Cerberus managed to escape from their cages, and got out into the Arklay Mountains. The Cerberus killed and partially ate hikers that were in the area over the next few months, wounding others. Those that were wounded had become cannibal zombies which would eat on human flesh. Armed Umbrella teams in the Arklay's failed to destroy the B.O.W.s during their attempt to reopen the nearby executive training school. Ever since 1996, Albert Wesker retired from the military to join the S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team in Raccoon City. S.T.A.R.S. is funded by the Umbrella Corporation as a law enforcement team. Umbrella wanted the entire incident covered up, so they gave Albert Wesker the order to send in his Alpha Team to the Arklay Mountains to be killed off by the B.O.W. while he would destroy damning material, record combat data as to the effectiveness of the creatures against his comrades, recover any data from the Arklay Lab's projects and finally blow up the facility to eliminate any connection Umbrella had to the killings. Wesker on the other hand, had left Umbrella, and joined the rival company, thinking that Umbrella was no longer a worthy cause. Rather than hand his data to Umbrella USA as expected, he faked his death and escaped the explosion, with four comrades corroborating his death.
Dr. William Birkin also followed Wesker's idea by leaving Umbrella himself. Unable to impress Spencer and not any possibilities to be in his circle of executives, Birkin would turn himself along with the T-Virus and G-Virus to the US military. He dumped T-Virus into other facilities such as a sewer treatment plant and the recently opened P-12A facility for processing failed experiments. This resulted in the t-Virus slowly spreading around Raccoon City, which by mid-September had the Raccoon General Hospital under strict quarantine. Birkin paid off Police Chief Brian Irons to have the sewers cleaned up, allowing a policeman to patrol it and interrupt a USS team that was handling C4 charges. Made aware to the operation, Birkin released his lab's Hunter R bio-weapons which went on to kill the rest of the research staff and his own guards so as to make himself and his wife, Annette Birkin, the only people aware of G-Virus.
The USS operations went bad when the Alpha Team, led by Agent HUNK, shot Birkin in the lab, and stole the case of G-Virus samples. However, the team didn't take into consideration that Birkin still had a sample of the virus with him as they left. Birkin had injected himself with the virus, causing himself to transform into a massive monster. He returned to the sewers and killed Alpha team or badly crippled them, except for HUNK, and destroying the case of G-Virus that the team stole from him. Exposure of the virus in the sewer had rats and cockroaches violently killing some of the combatants, the rats and cockroaches infected fled to the nearby Victory Lake, which is Raccoon City's water reservoir. The rats in the reservoir infected dam workers, making contaminated drinking water to make its way to the city.
Umbrella had become aware of the affairs in Raccoon City on September 16, because of cases of cannable hospital diseases. Contaminate water infecting many people, Umbrella gave the orders to the U.B.C.S. to evacuate the city with the aid of the United States Army and National Guard. This gave both Umbrella USA and Umbrella Europe the opportunity to test their super bio-weapons in combat. The Nemesis T-Type was sent in to eliminate the S.T.A.R.S. that survived the Mansion Incident two months earlier to avenge the death of the T-002 and Hunters. The U.B.C.S. force was eliminated soon after arrival on September 26, however, and Federal troops and the National Guard pulled out of the city to their blockades, abandoning the survivors to their fate. An influential American civil servant, Derek C. Simmons, used his influence in the U.S. government, particularly US Senator, Ron Davis, to push for his contingency plan of destroying the city with an experimental fuel-air bomb. Early in the morning on October 1st, the President Of The United States, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, The National Security Council agreed to destroy the city with a bomb. Umbrella, their rival company, the U.S. military, an American terrorist organization, and a black-marketeer, succeeded in obtaining samples of the G-Virus through their own respective channels and all evidence linking any party to the disaster was destroyed or covered-up. Right after, The Connections secured a facility they called ARK, housing Elpis with the hopes they can discover a virus that can be used to control minds.
The Decline Of Umbrella (1998-2004)
Congress voted to suspend Umbrella USA's rights to continue any kind of business operations in the country, federalize Umbrella's assets. Due to extreme criticism to his part in the total destruction of Raccoon City, the president of the United States resigned. Despite initial newspaper reports from survivors about the incident, including an article by survivor Alyssa Ashcroft, the threat of bio-weaponry to the world was covered-up, meaning that the bombing of Raccoon City could not be defended by the government or the media. Due to the Raccoon City incident and destruction, the loss of the US Delta Team, the US Defense Security set up an Anti Umbrella Pursuit And Investigation Team. This an an anti Bio-Weapon agency within STRATCOM and given the Anti Virus Weapon Protocol No. 7600 which gave authorization to unsolicited operations in foreign countries to take on outbreak missions.
Umbrella continued to decline consistently after Raccoon City. Spencer decided it was time to clear house and had Umbrella's Africa facility shut down in November to avoid the Progenitor Virus being discovered, and its employees, including Brandon Bailey, killed soon after. In November, Leon S. Kennedy, a STARTCOM agent, sent in his friend Ark Thompson to Sheena Island, where there was another Umbrella facility. There an international outbreak when Commander Vincent Goldman believed Ark to be an Umbrella intelligence operative recording his illegal activities there. Ark and two children (Lott and Lily) are the only living left on the island with the outbreak culminated in an explosion that destroyed Umbrella's Tyrant mass production facility on the island.
In December, Umbrella's training camp on Rockfort Island was destroyed and its soldiers wiped out in an attack by their rival company's paramilitary group, H.C.F. and their Hunter B.O.W.s created from Dr. Wesker's stolen Arklay Lab data. Surviving Umbrella personnel fled to the Antarctic Transport Terminal, but brought the T-Virus with them. The facility was destroyed when former S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team member Chris Redfield set off the auto-destruct system.
Over the next few years, Umbrella found it increasingly difficult to keep its employees in line, particularly with the loss of its prison complexes on Rockfort and Sheena. Umbrella employees went rogue by slowly feeding the bioweapons to the black market, even though their experiments and outbreaks were being successfully covered up by the US government. The U.S. established another counter-bioterror force, the Federal Bioterrorism Commission, at the start of the War on Terror for such an event. In 2002, former executive Morpheus D. Duvall led a terrorist operation to raid the Umbrella Europe's Paris Laboratory, where samples of T-Virus and the experimental T+G Virus were stored. The group then boarded the Spencer Rain while it was transporting Hunter Elites to an unidentified recipient in North America and threatened to fire missiles designed to disperse t-Virus at the United States and China if they did not hand over $5 billion. STRATCOM and China's Security ministry ended the crisis, covering up so the media couldn't know about it.
By February 2003, the Umbrella Corporation is on life support. A Caucasian chemical plant that was bought in 1998 by a shell company set up operations. The facility, commanded by Colonel Sergei Vladimir, oversaw the final preparation of the T-A.L.O.S. project since it was retrieved from the Arklay Laboratory shortly before Wesker's arrival. This base of Umbrella housed the U.M.F.-013 which is a supercomputer containing all of Umbrella's research and data that if in the case of a collapse, an outside group could retrieve the data to claim and continue Umbrella's legacy. Bioweapons that was originally deemed useless were being mass produced in this facility to avoid bankruptcy. Operatives expanded their sales to take advantage of the War on Terror, and B.O.W. combat deployments slowly became a reality though, as with a B.O.W. operation halted in South America by STRATCOM agent Kennedy, it was officially kept quiet and B.O.W.s remained a threat. In January 2003, an outbreak had occurred in the Caucus facility, which caught Wesker's attention. The village, whose people had been hired by Col. Vladimir to protect important Umbrella materials and store B.O.W.s such as Hunter δ for transfer, were killed or otherwise infected when they inadvertently sealed themselves with a group of Zombies when fleeing the monsters. The village was burnt down and Wesker successfully obtained what he wanted, but Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine correctly deduced there was an Umbrella base nearby. Soon after, both forces converged on the chemical plant, killed the mutants, T-A.L.O.S. and Col. Vladimir Sergei. After the Umbrella facility went dark, Wesker moved in and downloaded the data from the supercomputer for his own purposes in the future.
Until 2003, Umbrella fought an expensive legal case in the United States to reverse Umbrella U.S.A.'s federalization and clear any association with the Raccoon City incident which, if they were to lose, would bankrupt them from compensation claims. Despite two of Umbrella's former employees, Yoko Suzuki and Linda Baldwin, testifying against Umbrella in court, Umbrella was able to argue its innocence on the grounds of a lack of evidence and, with the help of false witnesses, spent four years trying to force all blame on the United States and accuse them of covering up their involvement. The trial took a shocking twist on things when Wesker presented Umbrella's archives to prove their direct involvement in the Raccoon City incident. The evidence presented wasn't allowed to be revealed to the public for US interest. After this verdict, not only did Umbrella Pharmaceuticals and Umbrella Corporation declare bankruptcy, but American and Russian intelligence services began an international manhunt for Spencer seeking his arrest for the crimes that took place in both countries. Spencer was able to stay in hiding but was founded several years later. With the bankruptcy of Umbrella, their Japanese branch was among the only remaining subsidiaries left and itself went into liquidation in March 2004 when no company in Japan was willing to risk its reputation in purchasing it.
Products
A contributing factor to Umbrella's success were their non-lethal commercial products. Such products include:
- Adravil: A paste-based drug with the motto of "Quick and Easy Relief: Adravil." It may be a reference to the real drug Advil.
- Safsprin: An apparent Aspirin-based brand. This brand's motto is "The Common Cure."
- Uspirim: Another Umbrella Aspirin-based product, introduced in Alyssa Ashcroft's good ending in Resident Evil Outbreak.
- Aqua Cure: Umbrella's crowning public achievement, Aqua Cure is an ointment used on open wounds that made the company famous worldwide. It is considered to be Umbrella's primary public product and is very effective.
- Raccoonefin: An herbal medicine made from Green Herbs.
Facilities
- Rockfort Island: A solitary island which served as the site of Alfred Ashford's private residence and palace after he purchased the land and drove the villagers out. It also housed an "inescapable" prison camp, a Military Training Center (including a lab used to create B.O.W.s), and an airport.
- Antarctic Base: A facility established by Alexander Ashford for his Code: Veronica project. Later, Alexia Ashford, an offspring of the project, used the facility for her t-Veronica virus research. By October, 2012, the facility was used by Umbrella Co. in a failed attempt to dispose of 3A7 with acquired C-Virus bioweapons.
- Umbrella Waste Disposal Facility: A waste disposal facility on an unnamed island in the Atlantic Ocean. It was to this facility that Umbrella sent some of its worst failed experiments to be disposed of. Due to ignorance in disposal methods by its staff however, some experiments thrived in its depths, resulting in a viral outbreak. This forced the facility to shut down until proper countermeasures could be taken. It was used as a base of operations by renegade Umbrella executive Morpheus D. Duvall. The facility was destroyed by Morpheus' t-Virus warheads that were detonated from the missile silos on the island.
- Umbrella Africa Laboratory: This facility was set up in the late 1960s by Umbrella Chemical, Inc. in secrecy. Built within the underground ruins of the Ndipaya Kingdom, only high-ranking Umbrella researchers and the remaining Ndipaya knew of its existence. After it closed down in 1998, the pharmaceutical enterprise, TRICELL, Inc., under the guidance of Albert Wesker, claimed the abandoned facility and began creating their own facility further underground. It was here that they further developed the Progenitor virus and began work on the "Uroboros Project."
- Sonido de Tortuga Island: A former United States military base that was purchased by Umbrella and converted into a laboratory. Oswell E. Spencer personally visited the island during the purchase.
- Umbrella Lab: A top-secret, underground Umbrella laboratory that only a few elite Umbrella executives knew existed. It was quarantined from a t-Virus leak that infected the staff before the corporation's dissolution. As of March, 2012, its assets and research data had been obtained by Umbrella Co., re-purposing the facility primarily for weapons testing.
Paramilitary Units
- Umbrella Security Service - Assigned with security operations ranging from guarding of bases to hostage rescuing and anti-terrorism. Reported directly to headquarters.
- Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service - Assigned with combating escaped bio-weapons. Reported directly to headquarters.
- Monitors - Secret police. Ordered to report information vital to the company and inform headquarters of rogue employees.
- Undertaker Unit - An alternative anti-B.O.W. force using specially trained B.O.W.s. that would dissolve upon death.
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