Albert Wesker

Dr. Albert Wesker was an accomplished virologist notorious for his work with groups affiliated with the bio-weapons black market. Originally one of the test subjects in the Project W who specialized in biotechnology and bio-engineering, he was an utmost elite perfectionist individual of absolute coldness, calm, composure, silent and without emotion, always wearing deep-black sunglasses that gave him even more an unapproachable air. As a senior researcher linked to the t-Virus Project as early as 1978, Wesker bore witness and in times shaped Umbrella's B.O.W. research. He officially left the company soon after the stall in the Tyrant Project, and began work as a spy, leading to a career in the United States Army and eventually with S.T.A.R.S. as its Captain. Wesker ultimately chose to betray Umbrella and work with other groups to steal its research data, benefiting from a mutation brought on by a prototype virus, that made him in his self-assertion believe that he was the absolute chosen to achieve the ultimate goal of causing the mass extinction of humanity in favor of evolution. Ultimately, Wesker was killed in March 2009 during a BSAA operation which uncovered his role in a doomsday project dubbed Uroboros.

Little is known of Wesker's childhood, even for his real name. It is understood that he inherited advantageous genes, relating to intelligence from his parents. Taken from his parents at a young age by agents of Dr. Oswell E. Spencer, Earl Spencer, he was raised in one of perhaps several homes funded by the Spencer Foundation. This was to serve as the first stage of a eugenics project, which sought to raise a group of like-minded, gifted individuals who could, in the future, be infected with a stabilized variant of the Progenitor Virus and entrusted with its superhuman effects. The children, all named "Wesker" after the project leader, were raised to share Spencer's values, harboring particular disdain for war and pestilence, believing that humans are to be an evolutionary dead-end in need of order, deliverance and rebirth. In this regard, he stood out before the other Weskers for his absolute ambition in these aspects. Given the finest education money could buy, he made his way into university education at a young age, and graduated with a doctorate in virology at the age of seventeen.

Having been head-hunted by the Spencer Foundation for his promising grades, Wesker was hired by Umbrella Pharmaceuticals in 1977. With the intent on indoctrinating him and other child prodigies, he was given a place at a company-run boarding school, the Umbrella Executive Training Center, with a lesson program built to indoctrinate these children with the aggressive and inhuman values required to advance Umbrella's viral weapon research. The class of 1978 was criticized by the Deputy Director for being lackluster, with the exception of Wesker and the sixteen-year-old Dr. William Birkin, who showed a competition of talent and a ruthless character that would do well for the company. Dr. James Marcus, one of the co-founders of the Umbrella Pharmaceuticals and the director of the facility, took great interest in Wesker and Birkin, and earned his trust. Following a series of company scandals that were covered-up, training school was closed at the end of the year, with the two students being immediately offered jobs and transferred to the nearby Arklay Laboratory as senior researchers, secretly as a reward for stealing a sample of Marcus' completed t-Virus strain.

Wesker's involvement in the t-Virus Project began immediately after his assignment to Arklay Laboratory began. The two arrived at a time when Umbrella was considering developing Ebola-based viral weaponry officially as part of a vaccination program. The two were successful in splicing genes from Ebola onto the stolen t-Virus strain, creating an altered virus that was better able to bypass the immune system, increasing the chances of humans surviving infection and becoming Zombies. This rejection of Spencer's idea of t-Virus being used specifically for killing paved the way for a wide array of future research.

With the t-Virus Project progressing well, despite only developing B.O.W.s of decent, but sub-human intelligence, Umbrella began pressuring the duo to come up with newer research. At some point in 1988, Dr. Spencer ordered that Dr. Marcus be assassinated and his body dumped away; both Arklay researchers attended the assassination to immediately recover ten years of research data, which he had kept for himself. The Tyrant Project, meanwhile, represented the next step in t-Virus weaponry, but due to the virus of the time only giving advantageous mutations to people with certain intelligence-regulating genes, statistically one in ten million, the project was stalled until a new t-Virus strain could be engineered, which would make it easier to create Tyrant prototypes, which could then be cloned.

As a workaround, the two were able to get a favor from Dr. Spencer to obtain an intelligent B.O.W. parasite, engineered by Umbrella Europe; the parasite, dubbed Nemesis Alpha, could solve the problem by hijacking a B.O.W.'s body and follow complex orders from trainers. The parasite was inserted into the body of a mutant human test subject, Lisa Trevor, to observe its reactions. When the parasite was killed by Trevor's immune system, this led to the discovery of Golgotha Virus, and Dr. Birkin's transfer away from the facility to NEST. Wesker also decided to leave the laboratory behind, confused about Dr. Spencer's motives in approving that funding Golgotha, as it was already seen as worthless for bio-weapons development. He took up employment with their intelligence bureau to find answers.

Over the course of the 1990s, Wesker was able to gain new employment with other groups by officially being an ex-Umbrella employee. From around 1991 he served with the US Army, having been scouted for his usefulness in their own illegal bio-weapons project. The military was presumably unaware of his work as a mole. Around this time, Wesker entered into a sexual relationship with a Serbian woman immigrant from Edonia whose last name was Muller, but lost interest soon after, unaware she was pregnant with his child.

Following his Army career, Wesker was reassigned by Umbrella in 1996 to serve in S.T.A.R.S., a private-funded police special forces unit in Raccoon City. The Special Tactics and Rescue Service was effectively Umbrella's private army, nominally raised to deal with the increasing threat of domestic terrorism in the American heartland, and earning them a direct source within the Raccoon Police Department should an investigation linger uncomfortably close to the company. He was made Captain of the Alpha Team and given seniority over Captain Enrico Marini.

The Spring and Summer of 1998 saw considerable upset to Umbrella in Raccoon City. The new ε strain infected a number of staff at the Arklay Laboratory in May, prompting a quarantine of the staff while its guards made preparations to shoot all escapees. Drs. Wesker and Birkin personally visited the lab shortly after the alarm was raised to evacuate the cloned embryos of the T-002 Tyrant, one of Umbrella's most important assets. Wesker also gave orders to forbid phone calls in order to limit the spread of information.

Escaped Cerberus B.O.W.s did however escape their cages and began killing and attacking civilians in Raccoon Forest, with infected survivors going on to kill others. By July the number of killings had surpassed 20 in what the RPD theorised to be the work of a cult. Unable to find suspects and, after press backlash, the RPD assigned the case to S.T.A.R.S. No longer able to manage the situation from within, Umbrella HQ produced the "X-Day" plans, giving Wesker a series of tasks to perform during the mission. He received orders to sacrifice S.T.A.R.S. to the mutants to provide combat data, eliminating them as witnesses; to collect the remaining B.O.W. embryos, and to finally destroy the Arklay Laboratory itself to wipe out all trace of the virus. On July 23rd, Wesker sabotaged the engine of Bravo Team's helicopter, which would prevent their escape and require Alpha Team's subsequent investigation.

During the S.T.A.R.S. preparation, Wesker and Birkin also had other duties with the company, and were to oversee the re-opening of the executive training school, possibly to make up for the loss of the Arklay Laboratory. An attack by a nascent mutant leech colony destroyed two armed investigation teams and infected the occupants of a private train taking key personnel to the school. To prevent the outbreak spreading out further, the two made plans to blow up the training school. While there, Wesker encountered Col. Sergei Vladimir, the executive in charge of the UBCS, after Umbrella HQ took notice of the incident. Wesker escaped from the facility before its destruction, but his experiences in the night convinced him abandoning Umbrella was now essential. He agreed to a rival company's offer of employment in exchange for giving them the embryo samples rather than handing them over to Umbrella.

On the evening of July 24th, Wesker led Alpha Team out to the mountains as he had expected. To better his chances of survival, Wesker was provided with a mutant t-Virus strain designed to mutate his body to enhance his strength and regenerative abilities. He also threatened Barry Burton with the nonexistent threat of his family's murder, forcing him to assist in the confiscation or destruction of incriminating evidence. Soon after arriving at Bravo Team's helicopter site, where RPD pilot Kevin Dooley's body was discovered, the team was attacked by the Cerberus pack and Joseph Frost killed, with pilot Brad Vickers abandoning the group. The others fled to the nearby Spencer Mansion to seek shelter. Inside, Wesker separated themselves into groups and continued with his mission. During the night he discovered Captain Enrico Marini to be alive and having incriminating evidence against Umbrella, and promptly shot him in the underground tunnels before fleeing.

In the lab, Wesker began preparations for waking up the Tyrant to kill the remaining S.T.A.R.S. survivors, infecting himself with the mutant virus strain shortly before doing so. He was cornered by his comrades while in the chamber and confessed his role in Umbrella's conspiracy before ordering the Tyrant to attack them. However, T-002 recognized Wesker as a participant in the Tyrant Project, and he stabbed Wesker first, impaling him through the chest before going after the others. Though Wesker was seriously wounded, the virus in his body had succeeded in mutating him to possess impressive regenerative abilities, and he woke up in an empty room. With the self-destruct system prematurely activated and his computer access restricted by Col. Vladimir and the RED QUEEN AI, Wesker was unable to recover the embryos or any important data to hand over to Umbrella's rival company. He narrowly escaped the destruction of the mansion after a fight with Lisa Trevor, but his improved speed ensured his survival. Believed dead by Umbrella and S.T.A.R.S., Wesker was able to gain employment within the company despite his failure to provide the samples.

Still maintaining the illusion of death, Wesker avoided showing himself publicly and instead took to being the contact between the organization and its spies. When Dr. Birkin completed Golgotha, the organization made plans to steal it, and Wesker played a role as an external contact between the group and their spy, Ada Wong, the other being a liaison based within the Apple Inn. With the t-Virus outbreak slowing down Wong's investigation, the liaison killed himself to avoid turning into a Zombie. Through a computer feed, Wesker took over the liaison's role and waited for Wong's arrival on October 1st. When she confirmed the retrieval of a Golgotha sample, Wesker directed her to an Umbrella helicopter ferrying Col. Vladimir and an executive out of the city, which she hitched a ride on to escape the bombing.

Following the acquisition of Golgotha, the organization began sending their paramilitary group, H.C.F., out on raids to Umbrella bases to recover data and bioweapons samples. Wesker led a raid on Rockfort Island in December 1998. Remembering Alexia Ashford's research on t-Veronica, the Ashford-owned island was a logical place to begin the search. Saboteurs arrived on the island ahead of the main assault and planted explosives within the military training center, which released a t-Virus strain into the ecosystem as well as releasing B.O.W.s. Much of the island's infrastructure was destroyed in the subsequent bombing by H.C.F.'s aircraft, followed by the deployment of special teams searching for the t-Veronica samples, of which Wesker took direct involvement. They were unsuccessful in locating samples on the island, though Wesker did discover Claire Redfield, Chris' younger sister, had been taken captive by Umbrella and imprisoned in its concentration camp. Chris arrived the following day, looking for her. Wesker was interrupted on both occasions when about to kill them, and soon after left the island for a submarine after discovering Alexia was alive and well at Umbrella's Antarctic Base.

The facility had itself also fallen to a t-Virus outbreak after refugees from Rockfort Island fled there, but the team succeeded in entering it through a submarine pen. Finding himself in an underground mansion, Wesker met Alexia for the first time and demanded she hand herself over to provide him with a sample. She refused and began mutating into a more powerful form which even Wesker was unprepared for, and he was forced to flee the mansion. Not long after, H.C.F. discovered the body of Steve Burnside, a teenager Alexia had recently used as a t-Veronica test subject, and they returned to the submarine. Having discovered Chris and Claire in Antarctica, Wesker finally took advantage of the opportunity to eliminate the two. Initially taking Claire hostage and dragging her to the submarine, he was persuaded to let her run on the promise of a fight with Chris. Though he was able to dominate Chris with little effort, Chris got the better of him by dropping metal girders onto him. With the facility close to self-destruction and his skin burnt by a fire, Wesker gave up and left for the submarine.

With the organisation now in possession of Golgotha; t-Veronica, and manufacturing modified clones of several Umbrella B.O.W.s, Wesker took a more senior role in selling these bioweapons to interested parties as Umbrella entered its long period of collapse. By August 2002, Wesker was negotiating the sale of weapons to Javier Hidalgo, the drug lord running the Sacred Snakes cartel. An Umbrella customer for over 10 years, Hidalgo began to suspect he was being conned as prices began to increase from the Russian production plant. Wesker convinced him to cease buying from Umbrella, and that a third party Asian broker asking Hidalgo for information was an Umbrella agent investigating him.

Not long after the sale of t-Veronica, Hidalgo entered a murderous rage over his daughter running away, and caused a viral outbreak as his Zombie army and B.O.W.s began destroying nearby communities. Wesker watched from a cliff as the US government's Anti-Umbrella Pursuit and Investigation Team, itself investigating the Asian broker, was forced to tackle the biohazard and, ultimately, killed Hidalgo. Soon after his incident, he was tracked down by Jack Krauser, an American soldier who had been injured during the mission and removed from active service, who believed Wesker could help him find a new purpose in life. He soon after faked his death in an accident to explain away his disappearance and entered service as an agent whom Wesker could trust.

In early 2003, the Organization became aware of a series of unusual incidents in the Caucasus, which led them to believe a biohazard was responsible. It was thereafter discovered that the region was the location of Umbrella's secret Russian base, and Wesker traveled there in search of the U.M.F.-013, the Arklay Laboratory's supercomputer Col. Vladimir had confiscated shortly before Alpha Team's arrival at the Spencer Mansion nearly five years prior. Heading to a village close to Umbrella's oil plant base, he discovered it had fallen to the outbreak, and the Hunter Delta B.O.W.s they were bribed to keep in storage had escaped. During his search for development data, Wesker ran into Chris Redfield and Valentine, who had joined an anti-biohazard force and were also alerted by the goings-on in Russia. Too busy to kill them, he retrieved the data and left.

Wesker arrived at the Umbrella base when the outbreak had almost fully engulfed it, and Col. Vladimir one of the few uninfected staff-members left. Though he made his way into the facility before the anti-biohazard force arrived, he was slowed down by Col. Vladimir's Ivan bodyguards, and was forced to kill them to progress further. When he reached the control centre. Col. Vladimir was overseeing the T-A.L.O.S. fight with Redfield and Valentine. Rather than give up his allegiances to the sunken ship, the executive infected himself with a perfected t-Virus strain to match Wesker in a fight over the computer. Vladimir lost the fight, and Wesker downloaded the U.M.F.-013's entire data, the Umbrella Archives, before ordering RED QUEEN to delete everything on the server, denying his former S.T.A.R.S. comrades access to incriminating information to use against Umbrella. Soon after the raid, Wesker provided the Archives or, at least, excerpts of it, to the US government.

Having been locked into a dead-end lawsuit with Umbrella USA over damages following the destruction of Raccoon City, the excerpts provided irrefutable proof they were the manufacturers of the virus that contaminated the town. After the verdict was made requiring compensation for victims, Umbrella Pharmaceuticals was forced to declare bankruptcy, and the US and Russian Federation collaborated in tracking down the whereabouts of Dr. Spencer.

Within months of the raid on the Caucasus laboratory, Wesker found his use for the Umbrella Archives in Excella Gionne, a geneticist employed by Tricell who, like him, held a low opinion of others outside of their use as work. Providing Gionne with in-depth information on the t-Virus Project, her career was excelled and, with it, Tricell's bioweapons development project, and soon she became the CEO of TRICELL Inc, Africa, where she became the de facto chief of bioweapons development. The two became close business partners, with Gionne being trustworthy to the point of knowing his need for a medicine, PG67A/W, and though having a sexual attraction towards him these feelings were not reciprocated.

The business meetings got the attention of the Organization by mid-2004, and while Wesker oversaw their attempts to obtain a Plaga parasite from Los Iluminados, Wong received secret instructions to hand him a sample of the recessive subspecies and keep any dominant subspecies samples for the group. Wesker, who had been planning to provide Tricell with the latter. Wesker was nonetheless successful in obtaining the desired sample from the remains of Krauser's corpse, who had been parasitized.

By 2006, Wesker and Gionne had established a B.O.W. trade ring through Ricardo Irving, in which B.O.W.s created as side-products of Plaga research could be sold across the world and profits funded into bioweapons development without a paper trail, and a massive B.O.W. R&D facility was constructed in the same African cavern Umbrella's founders had discovered the Progenitor Virus in, discovered after tracking down the remaining Umbrella employees with knowledge of it.

This connection to Irving got the attention of Dr. Lord Spencer who, near death, had Irving contacted as a go-between as a pretext for Wesker's visit at the Spencer Estate. There, the existence of the Wesker Project was revealed to him, which finally put to a close questions he had been struggling with since his time at Umbrella, having been entirely unaware that the B.O.W. research project was meant to acquire data for a eugenics project. Seeing no more use for Oswell, Wesker impaled him with a stab to the chest using an open hand. Immediately after, he was interrupted by Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, now working for the BSAA, who had come to arrest Dr. Lord Spencer. In the fight with the two, Wesker and Valentine fell through a window and down the cliff-edge.

Having survived the plunge into the Atlantic and carrying an unconscious Valentine, Wesker looked back on his previous run-ins with resistance as well as the revelation of his identity. From here, the Uroboros Project began, which aimed to create a virus that would both rid the world of such organizations as the BSAA and mutate those with certain genetic characteristics into superhuman beings. Valentine was kept alive in cold sleep at Tricell's facility to serve as one a test-subject, one of thousands who would be kidnapped over the next two years. Further analysis however determined that she had antibodies to the t-Virus in her system, which made her a poor test subject. Rather than simply killing her, Wesker saw fit to have her regularly injected with performance-enhancing drugs to serve unwillingly as one of his agents.

Work at the Tricell facility continued for the next two years, taking on more expansive tasks such as the production of missiles designed to release Uroboros into the troposphere; having acquired a stealth bomber from an unknown seller, Wesker planned to some day take off and release the virus around the world to force death or evolution on all mankind. Though Wesker and Gionne ran a tight ship at the Tricell facility, even having the research staff executed upon reaching the final stage of Uroboros research, leaks nonetheless occurred, and the BSAA heard rumours of a doomsday project called Uroboros and Valentine being alive, but had no proof to back either up.

In March 2009, the BSAA was deployed into the nearby city of Kijuju to detain Irving after he was linked to a local uprising of suspected bio-weapons associations. Redfield and his partner, Sheva Alomar, were successful in killing Irving. While dying, he was willing to give information and directed them to the cavern. There, the two met with Wesker, Gionne and Valentine. Determined to keep everything on schedule despite the setback, Wesker and Gionne departed to a Tricell tanker the stealth bomber was hidden aboard. When it was revealed that the two BSAA agents had also boarded it, Wesker infected Gionne herself with Uroboros as a distraction, mutating her and creating a towering monster which caused catastrophic damage to the tanker.

Having learnt of Wesker's need for medicine, he was confronted during launch preparation for the stealth bomber and given an overdose of PG67A/W. Weakened but still dangerous, Wesker was able to take off from the tanker and fought the two BSAA agents on board the bomber. When the rear hatch opened up, he was pulled out and, though he made an attempt to take Alomar with him, a gunshot wound sent him falling to the ground. As the stealth bomber was falling to the ground, he was able to survive the fall towards a volcano. With the Uroboros Project ruined, Wesker destroyed one of the missiles so as to infect himself with the virus. The fight across the volcano was put to a close when a BSAA helicopter picked up Redfield and Alomar, who were able to use RPG-7s to create an explosion that incinerated him after he fell into the lava.

News of Wesker's death spread through the B.O.W. underworld to several individuals and organizations, including Ada Wong and Alex Wesker. His death left Wong with a slight feeling of emptiness due to such a huge presence vanishing. His death left Alex saddened and lonely as a result of losing someone she regarded as a sibling and equal. She escalated research on her own projects intent on creating another generation of Übermensch, and studied Uroboros samples acquired in Africa either donated by Albert himself or recovered after his death. With Wesker dead and his affiliated organizations collapsed, the U.S. government's protection of Sherry Birkin was no longer necessary and she was released from house arrest under the condition that she become a government agent.

Wesker's research findings and a lot of experimental products and data were confiscated from his personal effects after his death and inspected in-house by the rehabilitated Umbrella Co. private military company. Among them was the study of anti-B.O.W. countermeasure weapons and tactics against a variety of viral weapons with total neutralization in mind. He considered not only neutralizing one side's viral weapons, but also situations where neither side possessed viral weapons. Part of the research envisioned combat in an unafflicted state alongside much conceptualizing of practical use by skilled combatants not equipped with weapons of mass destruction such as viruses. In one paper he argued that weapons of mass destruction don't necessarily lead to improving a situation.

Posthumously, his illegitimate son, the future mercenary, Jake Muller, inherited Wesker's immunity to viral infections, which gave him protection against mutagenic pathogens such as C-Virus.

In 2017, the Umbrella Co. Anti-Bioweapon Development Bureau based in the U.S. developed the "Anti-B.O.W. Arms Albert System Weapon Series" using Wesker's research results. The smallest unit in this series was the Samurai Edge Albert.W.Model 01 handgun deemed to be humanity's penultimate anti-biohazard armament and based on Wesker's custom Samurai Edge. Another was the Thor's Hammer Albert.W.Model 02, a 12-gauge automatic shotgun. Umbrella conducted development based on mass-production to be supplied for testing to anti-biohazard units such as the BSAA. His anti-B.O.W. research results were extremely effective in redeeming most of the old Umbrella's dark legacy and mesmerized the researchers.

Before his death, his H.C.F. group had a role in creating a Progenitor-enhanced mold, collaborating with The Connections in the 2000s. The mold would be later grafted to an artificially born bioweapon: E-001, also known as Eveline.

And he is reprised by DC Douglas in the English dub and Jouji Nakata in the Japanese dub.