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The Rise of the Zombie

Zombies are everywhere in popular culture, and games are no different. We chart their rise to prominence in gaming and speculate where the living dead might shuffle next.

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There are few paths as well-trodden in contemporary entertainment as the one walked by the modern zombie. These brain-chomping undead shufflers have evolved over the years to serve a multitude of cultural masters, and while one might think that this had left the sub-genre utterly exhausted of ideas, as we've seen, particularly in gaming, there's still plenty of life left in these husks and this is one horror niche that isn't going away, regardless of how many headshots we land.

Zombies, even if they weren't called that at the time, have been in popular culture since, well, forever. There are references in religious scriptures to the dead rising, and the notion has been recycled and reused throughout the centuries. The further back you go, the less reliable the historical record, but the living dead started to come into wider prominence via Haitian folklore and in literary works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the first sixty or so years of the twentieth century, when people weren't trying to kill each other en masse, we started to see the word being used to describe what we commonly know as today's modern zombie, but it wasn't until George A. Romero made Night of the Living Dead in 1968 that our current notion of the undead was really nailed down.

The Rise of the Zombie
Night of the Living Dead is a true milestone for the genre.

And what a ride it has been since then. Starting on the page and eventually migrating to the big screen, we've seen countless books and films portray these mindless flesh-eating creatures in one way or another. Of course, one can intellectualise these drone-like beasts and call them the ironic and absurd reflection of a capitalist society hell-bent on consuming the latest fads and trends, but a strong metaphor will only get you so far and it's the brutal relentlessness and primal nature of the zombie that really fascinates and helps it to endure as a core staple of popular culture. We fear these soulless creatures, yet we find them thrilling in equal measure.

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Their arrival in games started as soon as developers could do a decent job of animating them. 1982's maze-filled top-down adventure Entombed was a very early adventure, and in the decade that followed, we saw the likes of The Evil Dead (1984) - where players got to take control of Ash Williams for the first time - and Ghosts and Goblins a year later in 1985. However, things got a lot more interesting for zombie hunters with the widespread introduction of 3D graphics, and the mid-90s saw a steady procession of genre classics start to emerge, with the likes of The House of the Dead (1995) pulling us in with light gun action in arcades the world over, and Resident Evil (1996) sending us down claustrophobic corridors from the comfort of our own homes.

The Rise of the Zombie
Resident Evil might look cute now, but it scared the crap out of us back in the '90s.

Now, this is where we wade into troubled waters because the zombie in the most traditional sense is a dead person who has been resurrected and turned into a brainless creature that wants nothing more than food. However, we've seen creatives experiment with the style and form of the zombie and they've given us some diverse interpretations over the years. In cinema, that means so-called infected turned ravenous hunters as we witnessed in 1985 with Return of the Living Dead (where we see zombies that run and talk - incidentally that movie also popularised the idea that zombies ate brains) and in 28 Days Later (2002), a trend that has since found a spot in gaming. We've also enjoyed more comedic cinematic adventures such as Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Zombieland (2009), proving that it's not all doom and gloom in the world of zombies.

In gaming, these varied interpretations have meant zombies that fired back in Doom (1993), clickers cursed with a not-quite-deadly fungal infection in The Last of Us (2013), and alien-infected zombified folks in Half-Life (1998) and Dead Space (2008). The undead are happy to rise wherever and whenever, and we've seen them in fantasy settings like Warhammer, in the deepest, darkest depths of space, as well as in the kind of graveyards that many of us walk past in our daily lives.

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The Rise of the Zombie
Dead Space doesn't have zombies in the strictest sense, but they're still terrifying.

By the time we hit the mid to late noughties, zombies were firmly entrenched in geek culture, especially in gaming where they remain a fan-favourite enemy type. However, you could argue that it took their appearance in the likes of The Walking Dead series on TV (which started back in 2010) and 2013 feature film World War Z, for the undead to go truly global. The movie starred Hollywood royalty in the form of Brad Pitt, giving it legitimacy over the hordes of zombie films that had come before it, regardless of whether it deserved it or not (although, in fairness, most zombie movies are trash so we shouldn't judge it too harshly). The long-running AMC show, on the other hand, was itself based on a series of graphic novels and was also supported by Telltale's episodic video game series of the same name (which concluded in 2019), and that triple-bill was particularly important in bringing the undead to new hordes of willing viewers.

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Regardless of how you like to consume your undead-filled entertainment, it's clear that we're in the golden age of zombified entertainment. The dead have risen in child-friendly games like 2009 pair Minecraft and Plants vs. Zombies (and later in the 2014 shooter set in the PvZ series subtitled Garden Warfare), and they've dominated the multiplayer space in their own unique way. DayZ (2012) is a particularly important milestone, as this post-apocalyptic sandbox simulation was also a big part of the movement that spawned the battle royale genre. Indeed, you might say came full circle when we were once again fighting zombies in Call of Duty's own battle royale game, Warzone (2020).

To be fair, the zombies aren't ever-present in Warzone (as far as I know, I'll be honest and admit that I don't keep up-to-date with that one), but there are a plethora of games out there where zombies are the soul narrative focus. However, standout genre entries nearly always have a hook of their own, and in Dying Light (2015) it was all about how the player interacted with the wider world, not just the undead. This parkour-centric open-world action-adventure by Techland was full of fast-paced undead killers that required quick thinking and agile fingers. The formula proved so popular that a sequel was commissioned and it spawned a spin-off in 2018, too. An interesting aside: the spin-off was called Dying Light: Bad Blood, and it was an adversarial multiplayer title that borrowed last-player-standing mechanics from the likes of PUBG but gave them an undead twist. While it never really took off and has since long been overshadowed by Dying Light 2, it represents yet another example of DayZ's recurrent influence.

The Rise of the Zombie
Dying Light's parkour traversal proved a real hit with players.

Speaking of Techland, the studio captured the spirit of B-movies rather well in Dead Island (2011), much like Capcom did before with the Dead Rising series which started back in 2006, and both of these sandbox games have an emphasis on improvised weapons. Microsoft's State of Decay (2013) pulled a more straight-faced trick that involved base building, and indie games such as Project Zomboid (which has been in Early Access for what feels like forever) delve into the sandbox element and try and push the envelope in terms of granular detail. It's the co-op action games that tend to do best, though, and the four-player extravaganza otherwise known as Left 4 Dead landed in the same year as Call of Duty's first foray into the genre with World at War's Zombies mode (2008). Killing Floor (2005) and its sequel (2016) also focus on teamwork, although they put bloody gore and action at the forefront of the cooperative sub-genre.

In between then and now we've seen seminal single-player adventures like The Last of Us riff on zombie themes, without going full-zombie. Indeed, Naughty Dog's action-adventure was impactful because of the human element explored in the narrative as much as it was because of the tense stealth-driven gameplay. This lightning has since been channeled into the 2020 sequel and then the 2023 live-action series from HBO.

TLoU came one year after Zombi U (2012) experimented with roguelite elements and a year before that horror master Shinji Mikami gave us The Evil Within (2014, and the sequel in 2017). Meanwhile, the Resident Evil franchise that Mikami started back in the '90s has also enjoyed something of a renaissance, finding its feet following a couple of more action-oriented series entries, culminating in an extremely well-received series of remakes of Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4 respectively.

The Rise of the Zombie
In The Last of Us the most dangerous things you'll meet are fellow survivors.

Board games are another area where zombies are popular (both original games like Dead of Winter and video game adaptations), and traditional video games also made some room for them in the first round of VR and AR experiences, which looked to explore this exhilarating sub-genre from new perspectives. You could argue that VR shooters are merely an evolution of light gun classics like The House of the Dead, but AR is altogether more interesting as it blends the real world with the digital realm. Another way to experience the zombie apocalypse is the increasing number of immersive theatre experiences that are popping up, placing groups of "players" in pre-prepared scenarios and then watching them mess up their pants as they work their way through the staged environments.

More recently we've played games that try different things with AI, such as 2019's Days Gone and its swarms of zombie-likes, as well as RTS title They Are Billions in 2017. These games, along with the multitude of lightweight yet novel VR and AR experiences out there on the mobile market, proved that there are plenty of directions still to explore. They might not all focus on zombies in the strictest sense of the word, but they're all exploring the same fertile ground.

The Rise of the Zombie
Days Gone's zombie-like enemies are controlled by group AI that makes them particularly frightening.

I mentioned them before, but co-op shooters remain a mainstay of the genre and it's worth circling back around to them for another pass. Back 4 Blood turned out great and has enjoyed generous post-launch support, however, it enjoyed the benefit of arriving with an audience primed for combat after we all got to team up for a decent adaption of World War Z in 2019.

What Back 4 Blood and its spiritual predecessors Left 4 Dead do particularly well, on top of the snappy gunplay, is they're able to induce cooperative panic in a team of players via the introduction of specialist enemy types that require quick thinking and adaptive strategising. Over the years we've seen runners and shufflers, deformities and monstrosities, and a bunch of other variations that further spice up the overall dynamic of the genre.

Ultimately this variation has proven key to the longevity of the zombie, as it gives players something to think about beyond the old staple nugget of advice that follows the genre around like a ball on a chain: "shoot them in the head". That's good advice for sure, but it isn't always enough these days.

Different enemy types have been created in order to challenge players in a multitude of ways because with familiarity comes a sense of safety. A good example is how we've seen numerous super-bloated enemy types spewing acidic stomach juices all over players in order to lower health and/or obscure their vision. My personal favourites are those found in 2012's Diablo III; the eels that spill out of them once you've taken them down are brilliantly disgusting). These lumbering brutes are often supported by nippier enemies with a lower profile that makes them harder to spot - especially in the heat of battle when your attention's focused elsewhere. Throw in a mix of bullet sponge heavies and even armed brutes with enough smarts to fire back, and these days it's never a case of simply taking shots at a slow-moving horde as it shuffles toward you.

The Rise of the Zombie
This handsome fella is called a boomer and he pukes acid on the player.

Clever designers have also tried to unnerve us by giving us deadly enemies that hit closer to home. Days Gone, for example, raised a few eyebrows when people first realised that there would be child-like zombies to deal with, but that's a trick we'd seen before in the likes of Dead Space 2 (2011).

Of course, there are those that rely on speed, and fleet-footed enemies, such as the so-called Freakers seen in Days Gone and the infected in Dying Light. These quick-sprinters provide a completely different challenge to, say, the zombies that keep crawling after you even after you've put them down (as we saw in the RE2 remaster). Dead Space and the 2023 remake had both, much to our collective delight.

For my part, to this day, I still shudder whenever I hear a low and distant whimper - and it doesn't matter what kind of game I'm playing. A faint yet haunting wail will always remind me of Left 4 Dead's witches, another undead-type that we've seen deployed in various ways over the years, most notably in the noise-sensitive clickers in The Last of Us - avoiding them requires stealth and the tippiest of toes.

It's not just the zombies themselves that developers can innovate with. Perhaps the cleverest part of the first two Left 4 Dead games was the AI director and the way that it kept players on their toes. That kind of AI-driven gameplay made a comeback in Days Gone (although in a single-player context), but we'd like to see more experimentation in this area.

Looking beyond AI, what other genre mashups might developers come up with in the years to come? I mentioned RTS game They Are Billions earlier, but I think that there's also room for games that explore turn-based mechanics, and while we're already seeing this kind of innovation in the indie space, it shouldn't be too long before that experimentation finds its way into the mainstream.

The Rise of the Zombie
In RTS game They Are Billions, the horde is massive and overwhelming.

Whether your zombie enemies are infected by a man-made chemical weapon, controlled by a parasite or nanobots, or have succumbed to some sort of natural infection, there's no sign that they're going away anytime soon. On the contrary, our collective enjoyment of zombified entertainment has ensured that we're going to be fighting waves of the undead for years to come. Their longevity is assured because content creators are fond of them too, not simply due to the universality of the threat they pose, but because zombies are a blank canvas to work with. They offer a series of preconceptions that give creatives the chance to toy with audience expectations and explore different narrative themes, all within the wider framework of an overarching narrative that we're all very familiar with.

The undead as we know them rose for the first time more than 50 years ago in George A. Romero's seminal motion picture, and since then we've walked down a series of well-trodden paths as writers, artists, directors, and game makers have explored the genre in new and interesting ways. Based on the simplicity of the concept you'd be forgiven for assuming that zombie games were a boring trope that has been done to death, but looking back over the last thirty-odd years of games and ahead to those still yet to rise from the grave proves that this is most certainly not the case. Zombies are here and they're here to stay, and just to be safe, you should definitely still aim for the head.

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