Albert Wesker

Leader of the Alpha Team and overall commander of STARS itself, Albert Wesker was an enigma. Rarely removing his sunglasses, Wesker hardly ever spoke to any of his teammates outside of Barry Burton. When the STARS were sent to investigate the murders of several people in the Arklay Mountains, Wesker disappeared from the group following an attack by MA-39 Cerberus and the discovery of the isolated Spencer Estate. By the time he finally turned up again, it was revealed that he was a traitor to the STARS and secretly working for the company who owned the mansion, Umbrella, Inc.

Wesker had been paid by Umbrella to ensure that the evidence of their scientists' experiments within the Spencer Estate facility would be destroyed, and that entailed getting rid of the two investigating STARS teams as well. To that end, Wesker sabotaged Bravo Team's helicopter and caused them to crash, thereby ensuring the deaths of Ed Dewey, Kevin Dooley, Kenneth J. Sullivan, and Forest Speyer. Enrico Marini, Richard Aiken, and Rebecca Chambers were all still alive by the time Alpha Team finally arrived.

Wesker disposed of Enrico himself when the Bravos' leader figured out that he was the traitor, shooting him in the head from the shadows before Enrico could warn the others. In the meantime, Wesker had made it down to the Spencer Estate's underground labs and had a look at the T-Virus research that had been conducted there. Impressed, he decided to betray Umbrella and steal their scientists' research for himself, but first he had to dispose of his remaining teammates, including Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. To this end, he unleashed the Tyrant from its stasis tank and sicced it on them. Unfortunately for Wesker, the Tyrant wasn't in the mood to take orders.

Comments

As with so many characters in the Resident Evil series, a lot of things could happen to Wesker depending on what the player did throughout the game. He could either die when the Tyrant turned on him and impaled him on its claws, or he could've escaped the main lab only to be jumped by a Chimera while setting the entire mansion to self-destruct.

The fact that he so obviously was killed either way made it extremely jarring when Capcom brought him back for their fourth game, Resident Evil: Code Veronica. As of the events in Code Veronica, Wesker was obviously no longer entirely human, sporting slitted reptilian pupils and enhanced physical strength, but this still did not explain how he survived the events of the first game. In an effort to solve this problem, Capcom released a video called Wesker's Report, which, among other things, detailed Wesker's history with Umbrella and explained away his survival by saying he was given a special virus by Dr. William Birkin that put him into a deathlike state for a time after being whacked by the Tyrant and/or Chimera.

Capcom remade the original Resident Evil, and, in Jill's best ending, Wesker actually escapes at the end rather than dying as his body is nowhere to be found in the Power Generator room, which solves the problem begun by Code Veronica but renders much of Wesker's Report somewhat inaccurate. The other endings still has Wesker being impaled by the Tyrant though.

Wesker of the novels and comics is almost identical to the Wesker of the games.