Reading pop journalism stuff like this sometimes has me reaching for the Cuervo before noon, but I must resist.. I must!

London – Hollywood’s current love affair with zombies is a weak echo of the decades-long romance between videogames and the living dead.

In any fantasy game, zombies haul themselves up out of the soil with an almost calming predictability, and ever since Doom introduced the gargle of the undead to its eerie soundtrack in 1993, they ve been a staple of shoot- em-ups, too.

DOOM was about demons, not Zombies. You might have been able to tell by all the pentagrams and horns, but if all else fails the point at which the game explicitly involves WALKING INTO HELL might have been a tipoff. Some early enemies involve reanimated corpses, but the game was about Zombies in the same way that Dungeons and Dragons is about Zombies – minor seasoning in the stew.

No game has ever treated the undead with such outright love as the cult hit Resident Evil, one of the first to deliver heart-stopping frights as its characters stumble down horror film passages awaiting the clawing arms of their foes, usually with just one or two bullets to protect them.

The game not only spawned dozens of sequels and remakes, but five Hollywood films and an entire gaming genre: survival horror .

Hilariously wrong. ‘Resident Evil’ was hardly the first, or even one of the earliest, horror videogames. Nor was it the first Survival Horror game; that honor is often given to ‘Sweet Home’, a predecessor to the Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan) series from the same publisher, Capcom, which had much of its setting and gameplay designed recycled to form Resident Evil in the first place. Other game writers and historians have their own theories of course, but the history of horror videogames dates back to the early 80s at a minimum.

All of the misinformation I was mocking was background for a review of the new 3DS Resident Evil Mercenaries game, which the reviewer thinks is poor value for money because it’s so derivative of past incarnations of Resident Evil. On that point we could probably agree; ‘Resident Evil’ is sorely lacking in innovation. How about a game where you work with the Zombies toward peaceful coexistence to the benefit of society as a whole?

The ball’s in your court, Capcom.

Tags: Journamalism, Videogames, What's Up with Japan?

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 at 9:44 am 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.