Back in the heady days before World of Warcraft (with its relatively positive portrayal of an Undead character race) took complete dominion of the MMO world, I played a couple of lesser massively multiplayer games. Like Star Wars Galaxies (lesser in many, many ways), but also City of Heroes, which was very popular in its own right, allowing players to put on virtual spandex to go out and Fight Evil, comic-book style.

Given the enormous financial success to be found terrorizing virtual Zombies, I suppose it was only a matter of time before a less enlightened Massively Multiplayer game came out to terrorize the Undead:

From the introduction of Cameron Petty, CEO and Creative Director at JumpCore, the game is an episodic MMOFPS that starts from 2009 and “each episode of the FPS game series will tell the story of a character that exemplifies one of the character classes in the MMO game. The player will experience that character’s journey from his or her previous existence into the post-Apocalyptic world brought to life in the UnDead Online MMO, while exploring the unique game play aspects of that character’s class along the way.”

I’m struggling to imagine how an MMO based on First Person Shooter mechanics could be good for Zombie Rights, but it’s very hard to conceive of this going any Zombie Friendly direction. Plus, here again, Zombie Apocalypse. Groan.

UnDead Online is only one of the upcoming Zombie-related multiplayer games being developed, actually.. and they all sound bad for Zombie Rights:

Zombies have swept through the whole gaming world! First there’s Dead Frontier, and then Zombie online from Korea, and the unnamed zombie shooting MMO by Undead Labs.

The ‘Undead Labs’ game wallows in your typical Anti-Zombie prejudices and, yes, it’s a Zombie Apocalypse scenario, how did you guess?

We want to let players determine their own fate with skillful play as opposed to figuring out how to stack the right numerical bonuses. You’ll be able to aim. We recommend aiming for the head.

I’ve actually met the man who first uttered those infamous words on screen, George Kosana, at Famous Monsters. You, game developer, are no George Kosana.

Not that he should be *proud* of it or anything but he was nice enough to help us out with our charity work.

In conclusion, it looks like we’re about to enter a bold and hateful new age in Anti-Zombie gaming, where the small-scale ‘cooperative’ gameplay of Left 4 Dead and its ilk morphs at least in part into larger, massively multiplayer hate-fests waging virtual war against the Differently Animated.

The ZRC will keep you updated on these developments.

Tags: Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.