At 91, chinese engineer cracks resident evil with paper maps and a pencil
While most players Google a walkthrough the moment a puzzle stumps them, Yang Binglin spent four weeks redrawing the Spencer Mansion corridor by corridor, filling 112 pages with inked grids, ammo counts, and the exact HP threshold of every Crimson Head. The result: a clean completion of Resident Evil Requiem—no guides, no chatbots, no outside oxygen.
The notebook that outperforms the algorithm
Yang’s method is brutally analog. Each night the retired petroleum engineer props a clipboard on his knee, rules a fresh quadrant, and timestamps every door he unlocks. Miss a shotgun shell? The margin reads “-6, revisit east wing @ 02:40”. The handwriting is microscopic, the logic flawless. Streamers one-hundredth his age now screen-grab his maps rather than speed-run videos.
He discovered the franchise late—at 82, after a mine-site cataract surgery left him housebound. Horror titles appealed because, as he told Chengdu reporters, “fear keeps the pulse algorithmic”. Since then he has polished off 312 games, catalogued 14 spiral notebooks, and earned a Guinness entry as the planet’s oldest active streamer. The trophy sits between a Rock Band drum kit and a 1998 CRT that still hums at 60 Hz.
Engineering mindset, virtual battlefield
Colleagues from the Sichuan drilling labs remember Yang pacing rigs with the same yellow notepad now covered in Tyrant sketches. “We used to joke he could triangulate oil with a protractor,” a former coworker laughed. Swap crude reservoirs for item boxes and the process is identical: isolate variables, test boundary conditions, iterate. The difference: subsurface pressure won’t jump-scare you.
His latest challenge is Outbreak’s timer-based virus gauge. Yang has already graphed viral load curves on semi-log paper and is recruiting two teenagers he met in a WeChat lobby to run co-op tests. They call him “Grandpa Lag”, affectionately, because his reflexes clock 180 ms—double the average pro’s. Yet his death count trails theirs.
Asked when he’ll quit, Yang snaps the clipboard shut. “Retirement is just another loading screen. You don’t exit; you press continue.” The man who once calculated pipeline tensile strength for 30,000-barrel flows now reduces zombie outbreaks to marginalia, and the servers keep logging in to watch.