The Walking, Running, Jumping & Standing Still Dead Film (1959)

(Old Blogger blog from April 2015)

State of Decay has been a wonderfully clunky, not quite what it could be but still a great deal of fun to play addition to my digital pile of games that I hope that one day I get to finish. As I am unlikely to ever probably invest my time in the franchise behemoth that is a GTA game again it has been a nice alternative and stopped me having to return to Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare for a third time. Both Rockstar and Undead Labs’ games are very close to giving me exactly what I am looking for in a zombie based videogame barring the odd ‘if only it had’ moment. If I could go back in time to when I was sat in the makeshift computer den under the stairs tap the hunched over me on the shoulder and pull the Amiga joystick from my grubby mitts and say,

“Hey, stop playing Horror Zombies from the Crypt don’t you realise there is going to be much better stuff to come? In fact you will have so many zombie games you could fill your entire collection with games that involve the rotting hoards in some way shape or form.” I’m pretty sure that 11 year old would have jumped out of the cubby hole and spent the next 15 or 20 years being so excited about this prospect that he would have never slept again and as a result actually become the sort of shambling monstrosity himself that he longed to headshot to kingdom come in a videogame.

My love of the shambling, rotting flesh-bags started sometime between seeing staying up to see the TV premier Michael Jackson’s Thriller video and the between fingers viewing of Dawn of the Dead at friend’s house. This viewing was on a video that must have been a fifth generation copy; the kind where the shadows of the film have a strange static effect that added an air of eerie and ambiguity to any night-time scene. The slasher horror films of the day, which my friends seemed so obsessed with, and their supernatural, unkillable killers such as Freddy, Jason and Michael always freaked the hell out of me with their inescapable bad guys, to the point of putting a self-imposed ban on myself watching them. Zombie movies however – for all the gore they contained – never seemed as hopeless. I had always felt that with a bit of common sense I would be able to survive the worst zombie apocalypse the world could have thrown at me unlike most of the fools that populated the films. They became my go to horror genre and although now when I try to recall them my entire memory squeezes them into one big maggot infested endless escape sequence, at the time they all stood out as wonderfully diverse catalogue of grease paint and prosthesis.

So fast forward to 2015 and the ubiquitous role that the undead hold in the videogame market you’d think I would be covered in the glorious sheen of bliss at all the various ways I can smash the groaning hoards. Yet here I am about to unload my grump at them. For a brief moment a year or two ago I thought everyone had grown sick too and things were about to take a turn for the less rotten style of enemy. But the exponential success DayZ and other releases from the same time dragged them all out of their graves again. My displeasure at the vast majority of the current crop of undead hack-a-thons is not down to the a misrepresentation of the less than living stars of them. I am not a zombie fanboy about to start jumping up and down because the zombies can jump up and down, or pop a gasket because they use weapons, or even start bleating on about the disparity between the classic Romero-esque animated corpses and the newer sprinty models. For a start, these are entirely fictional creations and suggesting the blueprint set by one director in a couple of films is more than a little bit obsessive. Personally I don’t care too much if the undead are a bit more fleet of foot or are able to hold a baseball bat to help open a brain or two. It always puzzles me how people who get so upset about running zombies don’t seem to question how a body with no blood-flow can see, hear, smell and touch which they all seem to do without too many issues. But then what do I know?

No, my issues are more to do with the lack of imagination that the undead are used in the exceptionally vast range of titles they find themselves being the antagonists in. The sandbox style of State of Decay and Undead Nightmare are great exponents of recreating the way in which I had imagined myself in a zombie movie. While the visceral combat is key there is also a large amount of eerie wandering about, making often difficult decisions and scraping about for every last bullet and bandage. Adding a new member to this group of games shouldn’t be a sin, especially as new technology gives developers more scope to create more of whatever they feel is missing. I also feel the rotting figures work very well as the target of the players’ ammunition within a hoard style game which has been so soundly illustrated by Treyarch in their Nazi Zombie mode. But even this after a few games becomes more about the enjoyment of the arena itself than the enemy models being faced.

This is where I feel our (or certainly my) patience is being pushed somewhat within the whole ‘zombie as the bad guy’ game. As an enemy the poor old zombie is criminally unimaginative which is only highlighted by its overuse.

George A. Romero proved to film-makers that with a limited budget and small crew the zombie genre was an excellent way of making something that felt much bigger, a much more expansive film than the receipts and shooting time would lead you to believe. The film’s high percentage return meant that many others followed suit and tried their hands a getting some of those hot zombie box office dollars. While a few of these coat-tail riding flicks are interesting in their own right most are nothing more than cinematic fast food - cheap, bland, regrettable and ultimately unsatisfying. While there were many games featuring zombies before it, Resident Evil (and admittedly Doom with its reanimated soldiers but that played more in influencing FPSs) and its acclaim and success had a similar effect on the games industry that NotLD did on movies. Many zombie filled titles followed over the years some great, some imaginative if a little shonkey but mostly they were poor to average games hiding behind their rotting cover models. It could be said that this is a trend for all videogames but the problem is when the poor to average games sell in the numbers that other genre games can only dream of. Which leads us onto another reason why the poor zombie becomes so heavily peddled.

Can’t be bothered to programme complex combative AI? Use zombies. Your ambitious complex combative AI doesn’t work properly? Use zombies. Can’t think of a suitable enemy for your game set in the jungle (or any other non-military setting)? Use zombies. Can’t think of a suitable bullet sponge? Use zombies. Need some DLC but can’t think of a sensible way of expanding your existing story? Use zombies. (You are exempt from this last one if you are a certain Western themed game that I mentioned earlier)

Am I alone in thinking that the zombie becomes an easy excuse for things not being quite up to muster? Why does this enemy continuously walk into the wall? It’s a zombie. Why has this particular enemy not spotted me? It’s a zombie. Why is this character’s eyeballs rolling around in a really creepy manner inside their skull? It’s Assassin’s Creed Unity. Or a zombie. It would seem not only are zombies popular they are also very easy to pass the coding blame onto.

I am not suggesting we should invoke an undead ban in games, but just that videogames featuring zombies should be videogames about zombies. Stubbs the Zombie, despite being a touch short, was an imaginative attempt at being a role reversal zombie game. The Left 4 Dead games offer a situation where without key teamwork you will almost certainly fail, or worse, have to leave the stragglers behind for the greater good. Recently State of Decay has helped wean me off Destiny and get back to actually playing a variety of games instead of just chugging away at one. This is mostly down to the relative freedom of pace the game gives you. While many of the objectives have a time based window to do them in the consequences that arise if you don’t are more about living with the guilt, or the lack of a shiny new stick to hit the undead with than a simple fail state or end of progression. All these feel like zombie games specifically. There are a few others too that although I have not had the opportunity to play myself have read or heard good things about. It really isn’t all bad when it comes to zombie games.

But while filmmakers might have turned to making zombie movies as an effective genre to use their limited budgets this shouldn’t have to apply to videogames. In the last few years small teams and indie devs have shown that when it comes to games some imagination and time can create incredible worlds, wild and unexpected stories in settings that a filmmaker on a similar shoestring budget could only dream of (although recently homemade CGI movies are certainly changing the limitations of this). Recently I played The Swapper, Jazzpunk and Kentucky Route Zero, all small(ish) projects with very interesting ideas on the worlds they present the player with, and, as far as I have seen no ‘traditional’ zombies. I get that by slapping a lipless, rotting face on top of your bog-standard shooter or your parkour simulator will shift those extra few copies but they won’t make it a better game. And isn’t that what creators and consumers alike are looking to achieve, better games. The potential for imagination within games is limitless so why are we continually clipping our wings with a shoehorned walking corpse.

Of course if we just replaced all the zombies with aliens or robots I’d be happier but then that’s what you get from growing up on a diet of 2000AD. Of course, zombie alien robots are fine.