Resident Evil 2 Remake’s sewers are a labyrinth of gloomy tunnels choked with waste and bodies. They’re also home to the G-Adult, a human infected with the G-Virus and caught somewhere in its metamorphosis between recognizable person and an amorphous blob. They ooze out of grates, pop up from where they hide in water, and run at you with one arm outstretched like a receiver in the final moments of a Super Bowl.

Claire’s goal, which she shares with Leon, is to open a locked door by finding and inserting chess piece-style plugs in a special configuration. The first step on this trail is to head out into the treatment plant, maneuver a bridge into place, and jog over to the far side where the cable car we spotted earlier sits. You can’t leave yet. Sherry’s still MIA, and the cable door needs power. Carci grabs a T-shaped tool and moves to a safe on the far side of the room. Inside the safe is an add-on for Claire’s starting handgun that lets her fire magnum bullets. She can’t mix magnum ammo like Leon can, so Carci has to make the finite supply he’ll find over the rest of the game count.

Through an exit door, Carci descends a narrow set of stairs and pops three zombies: two shambling toward him, one sleeping on the job—“We want to get rid of him now because he will wake up later”—with magnum rounds. From here, he takes a detour to a door that must be cranked open with the T-tool and across a catwalk set above the Organ Trail. It's the toughest room in the sewers, but right now Carci just needs to pick up a key that will open a passageway to the Raccoon Police Department. “Reason being, I want to upgrade my submachine gun the rest of the way, for safety’s sake.”

Unlike a practice stream where he overlooked a step and descended into the maze accidentally, he moves back the way he came to the room where he decapitated three zombies and opens a shuttered door leading deeper into the sewers. Before passing through it, he picks up a grenade nearby. It'll come in handy against Claire’s final boss, assuming Carci makes it that far without getting hit.

A G-Adult slithers out of a tunnel shortly after you move beyond the shuttered door. Carci doesn’t slow; he hugs the lefthand wall and marches forward. “When we move diagonally, I would collide with his extremely large hitbox. I would get stunned, and I cannot afford to have that happen. This is the only way to go right past him, and you absolutely cannot hesitate.”

He twists the T-tool into another door’s locking mechanism and takes a service elevator up to a break room. Normally, you’d find a roll of film and a side pack that adds two slots to your inventory on the table. There’s no side pack on Hardcore difficulty, but the roll of film is there. Carci takes it, puts a magnum round into the head of the prone zombie on the floor, and opens the far door. There are four zombies in this area: three walking about, and another slumped on a ceiling fixture across the room. Carci aims carefully and obliterates every head. Next, he crosses a bridge to use the key on a door across the way. He doubles back and plucks one of the chess-shaped plugs from a control panel. Doing so causes the bridge he just crossed to rise, but that’s okay; he won’t need to cross again.

The second and final door unlocked by his key—he’s unlocked both doors the key opens, so he can discard it—admits him into a small room with a secret elevator hidden behind a steel shelf. Riding the hidden elevator takes him into the basement of the RPD, where he finds another grenade. He makes his way up to the library and heads down the corridor outside the S.T.A.R.S. office. This area is safe since he “deleted” the licker in the early game. He needs the S.T.A.R.S. badge-turned-USB-drive he left behind when he picked up the SMG, but first it’s down to the darkroom to develop the roll of film he found in the sewers. The film reveals a secret drawer in the desk of Albert Wesker, one of the franchise’s big bads. His desk is in the S.T.A.R.S. office, and you have to develop the film before you can open the secret drawer. Back upstairs, Carci loots the desk and finds a stabilizer for Claire’s SMG. He grabs the USB drive, returns to the basement, and retracts the USB drive into a badge so it fits inside a weapon case. The case opens to reveal an upgrade for the SMG that doubles its max ammo capacity.

Interest in Carci’s flawless (so far) run was temporarily halted when he posed an intriguing question: “Can anyone confirm or deny, all you people at home, that USB was even a thing in 1998?”

This sent Twitch chat down a rabbit hole. I dived in right after them. USB ports were in extant in 1998, but few devices made use of them until the summer of 1998 with the release of USB 1.1. The subject of who invented the thumb drive, as it’s popularly known, is mired in controversy. In April 1999, M-Systems filed a patent for a device that paired flash memory with a USB-based disk. IBM filed a patent that year for the same type of device, as did the CEO of Phison Electronics Corporation. The thing is, all these filings in 1999 didn’t produce a piece of hardware.

There’s a difference, of course, between when a patent was filed and when a product saw the light of day. In 2000, IBM and M-Systems partnered to release the DiskOnKey, the first thumb drive available on the market—at least that’s what many sources claim, and in fact it’s what I believed until I sat down to write this chapter. It turns out a Singapore-based company called Trek 2000 International was the first to sell a thumb drive, creatively named ThumbDrive. Trek launched the product at the CeBIT international trade fair held on February 24, 2000. Yes, the same year as in the company’s name. Coincidence? Or conspiracy?! (The former.)

All of this boils down to a USB flash drive in RE2 Remake being anachronistic, but that’s okay. Sometimes it’s more important for stories to introduce trends or tech that evokes the story's time and place, accuracy be damned.

Leaving behind his thumb drive from the future, Carci bids the RPD farewell and makes his way back into the sewers. The G-Adult he marched by earlier has a bone to pick with him. It’s usually found oozing toward you. That’s a problem: You need to pass him again, and this time he’s ready for you. Staying on the platform, Carci squeezes off a few rounds of the SMG. Just a few. “If you shoot him while you're on a ledge, he will submerge. You have to confirm the start of that animation before you can jump off the ledge; if you don't, you're going to get grabbed and it's going to be a bad time.”

While the G-Adult flails, Carci inches by him and moves down the tunnel and into the Organ Trail. G-Adults guard many of the passageways, waiting for unwary travelers. Carci is anything but unwary. The G-Adult’s weak spot is a bulbous eye on the top of its head, or what used to be a head. Carci wades toward the first one, which is submerged just below the surface. He fires a single round from his SMG, causing the beast to surface, then unloads on the eye. The next G-Adult’s eye is protected by a carapace. Carci blasts it into chips, then takes out the eye. A third G-Adult slides out of a pipe. Its eye is exposed as it drops into the water; Carci takes advantage by hitting the eye until it submerges, then finishes it when it reappears.

The next room holds the last two chess-style keys Carci needs to unlock the boss door. A zombie is slumped over a railing across the room from where he enters. A single magnum round separates him from his head. To solve this room, Carci opens and closes doors by inserting and removing the queen- and king-shaped keys, respectively. Claire and Leon can take the keys and leave without picking up their alternate weapon (spark shot for Claire, flamethrower for Leon). However, both weapons are crucial to Carci’s strategy for either character. He claims the spark shot and chess keys and then heads back through the Organ Trail to the ladder that will take him out of the maze. Halfway to the ladder, a G-Adult explodes out of the water and rushes Carci with a football-style charge. Avoiding it is a simple matter of running backward until the G-Adult ducks underwater. That’s when you charge forward to sidle around him as he surfaces. If you’re quick enough, he’ll still be in his surfacing animation and won’t grab you.

Back in the chess-door room, Carci pops in the plugs and opens the locked door. Before heading to meet the boss, he takes a carefully curated selection of items: grenade launcher, flame rounds, flash grenades, SMG, and SMG bullets. He passes through the doorway and heads into a room where he manipulates a control panel to route power to the area. Then he runs toward the same door he entered, but curves back around toward the control panel. Crossing a certain spot on the floor, roughly where a power cord unravels, causes the boss, Birkin’s G2 mutation, to smash against the door. Carci takes shelter below a set of two industrial fans. This spot is critical: for his next attack, G2 stabs a clawed hand through the ceiling and swipes at Carci. If you’re under the fans, he’ll never be able to reach you. Carci shoots the hand with the SMG until it disappears, waits until Birkin stabs again, and opens fire a second time.

After his hand suffers a predetermined amount of damage, G2 moves to a shutter door just ahead and to the left. You can’t see him, but you can hear him; that’s how Carci knows to move right up against the shutter. G2 rams it three times. The third time sends it flying into the room, but for whatever reason, it passes through your character instead of colliding into you. Carci runs past G2, gets halfway down the narrow hallway, and then turns. G2 is recovering from its I-just-knocked-down-a-door-and-all-I-got-was-this-empty-room animation. He’s waiting for G2 to do what he calls a zippy: As soon as the animation ends, the G2 character model shifts abruptly to the side. It’s the game moving him into position to turn around and charge through the busted doorway. “We have to wait and shoot him there,” Carci says as he fires a flame round into G2’s exposed back.

The fire eats away at Birkin’s health, but he recovers swiftly and gives chase down the walkway. “When he does that, he's going to slash that pile of wood in front of us,” he says as Birkin pursues him. That’s when Birkin becomes visible at the bottom of the screen, just behind Claire. Carci doesn’t slow, sprinting to the end of the walkway and dropping onto a work platform. “That was really close. I almost never see him on-screen there.”

Carci and his friend MattDaRoc have choreographed this boss fight down to a science. There’s a crane holding a massive crate hanging nearby. Swinging it inflicts massive damage on G2. Of course, there’s a catch: Hitting G2 with the crate won’t kill him unless his HP is below a certain amount, and the crane takes time to reset after each swing. Carci plans to use the crane twice, and there are actions he must take while the crane resets for round two.

First: Activate the crane, then toss a flash grenade.

Second: As the crane reels the crate back like a pitcher readying a fastball, G2 reels from the flash grenade. Carci hits him with a flame round, and then…

Third: Unloads two full magazines of SMG ammo into him. This is where upgrading the weapon’s max ammo comes in handy: A double-size clip means more time shooting and less reloading. All this time, the fire is chewing through health. Once it drops below a set limit, G2 takes a knee.

Four: Hit the control panel again, causing the crane to swing the crate into G2. Carci has said on his streams that this does approximately 7,000 HP worth of damage. It’s a lot, but not quite enough.

Five: Operate the control panel to ready the crane for swing number two.

Six: Reload another flame round and a fresh SMG magazine.

Seven: Another flash grenade, another marshmallow roast with G2 playing the part of the marshmallow, another clip or two of SMG ammo until Birkin takes a knee again.

Eight: One final button press on the control panel, and the crate sends G2 over the side and into the chasm.

“We're good so far,” Carci says as his couch and the live crowd applaud his victory. “It looks like we have made it all the way to the laboratory.