No, that picture of Ethan Winters going around the internet isn’t real

If you’ve been on Twitter, Facebook, or really anywhere on the internet recently, you may have been treated to a picture of Ethan Winters. The Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village protagonist has remained faceless and still does, despite what you may have seen. That picture of Ethan Winters going around isn’t from Capcom, despite what people on Twitter may say. In fact, it’s not even art from anyone that worked on the game. According to a report from Fanbyte, the baby-faced Ethan Winters that’s been going around is actually a fan render from artist Ray “DemonLeon3D” Nunes.

Capcom has, for some reason, made a point out of keeping Ethan Winters’ appearance a secret. Throughout both Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village you won’t see Ethan’s face. There simply isn’t a single functional mirror, but to be fair in Village that make sense, considering the abundance of vampires.

If anything though, that encouraged Nunes to create his own version of Winters, according to Fanbyte’s report.

“When I played RE7 for the first time, in the first hour of the game, I thought Ethan’s face would appear at any moment. However, this wasn’t happening,” Nunes told Fanbyte via an email interview. “So my curiosity increased more and more as the game progressed. In each new scenario, I desperately searched for a mirror to see his face, but found no reflection. Even by the end of the game it didn’t show up.”

However, you wouldn’t know that the picture going around of Winters was a fake, and that’s likely because Nunes’ name has been cropped out of it. To him though, having his work go around without being able to take credit wasn’t a huge situation. “My art being confused with an official rendering is simply incredible,” Nunes told Fanbyte. “I never thought that my art would be good enough to be confused with official art from a franchise that I’ve loved since I was a child. This is certainly one of the greatest honors of my life.