Zombies have been everywhere for years now. They are still America’s favorite monsters and have permeated many areas of popular culture, from literature to gaming, hence the game Dead Island.
A friend of mine raved about Dead Island on Facebook, and it brought me back to the notion of horror creeping its way into gaming, something which I’d been out of touch with for some time.
Dead Island came out on September 6 and is currently on the cover of horror magazine Rue Morgue.
As Monica S. Kuebler reports, the game “is just about the closest thing yet to actually being deposited into the middle of a zombie pandemic.”
The game was developed in partnership with Deep Silver and Techland, and since I’ve been out of the horror / gaming loop for a bit, Kuebler also mentioned other recent undead games that did well including Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead.
Like the old school, pre-Romero zombie flicks, and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, this game takes place on an island, of course, and that’s the way the game was from day one.
“The contrast between the natural beauty of Banoi and the horror fo what’s happening creates a great contrast and tension,” says Hari Orkin, who wrote the game, and also compares battling zombies to playing “three-dimensional chess,” but with much higher stakes, of course.
“It’s about creating a fully realized world and then dropping the player into the middle of it,” Okrkin says, and as game producer Sebastian Recihert tells Rue Morgue, “You will never feel safe. You could be attacked everywhere. Every fight could be your last.”
Meanwhile, senior brand manager Vincent Kummer tells the magazine there’s more than one way to killer a zombie with this game.
”You can drown zombies or kick in their heads, set them on fire, blow them up, get creative!” Okrin adds, “There’s [just] something so primal and satisfying about taking out zombies.”
In addition to covering the game in depth, Rue Morgue also compiled a list of upcoming zombie games, and upcoming titles include Rise of Nightamres, Resident Evil 4 HD / Resident Evil Code: Veronica X HD, Pet Zombies, and All Zombies Must Die!
