Zombie MMO! Hell Yeah!
AUTHOR: Jeff
Welcome, zombie fans!
And MMO fans.
Oh, and of course console gaming fans.
And if you don’t fall into one of those categories, you are welcome to hang out anyway if you are console-zombie-MMO-curious.
Today Undead Labs proudly announces… well, our existence. Here’s the official word.
So what’s this site all about? Well, you’ll notice a few non-traditional things going on here.
First, the name of the studio. It’s not “Grumpy Gopher Games” or “Silver Platter Studios” or some generic name that can be applied to any kind of game. Traditional thinking is that your studio name should be genre-neutral, the rationale being that even if you want to make a game about the rotting undead today, in five years you might want to make a pet monkey simulator, and you don’t want to tie your name to a genre.
Um, yeah. Honestly, if we decide to make a pet monkey simulator in a few years, we’ll start a studio called MönkeyWerks or something. This studio is all about making the ultimate zombie apocalypse game, so we are Undead Labs.
You’ll also note that this website is very “blog like” in its layout and focus on news-style content. The fact is that we don’t have a game to put in your hands today, or a marketing team insisting on a “marketing focused” website, so right now the focus of our website is to let you know how it’s going.
We plan to be very transparent during the development process, and to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the early life of a new development studio and the process of bringing a triple-A MMO (or, MMOZ) to life. It’s too early to build a real game community, so hang out here if you are into the behind-the-scenes stuff. If you just want to hear about the game, file all of this in your “cool stuff to check into later” box and we’ll be sure to make some noise when the time is right.
For now, you can expect a few posts a month with features on the studio, the development process, design direction, the industry, and so on. A great way to keep up with new articles is to click that big orange RSS button at the top of this page, or you can just click here to subscribe. We’d also like to encourage you to be part of the Undead Labs community by sharing your thoughts on the articles we post (after reading the Lab Etiquette Guidelines, of course). Many of the initial articles will be written by me, but as new developers come onboard you’ll be hearing from them as well.
Thanks for reading. We look forward to getting to know you. Stay tuned.
Jeff
This is fantastic! I’m rooting for your guys.I have a plethora of questions to ask, It would be nice if you guys had a think tank for the public where people can express what they’d like to see or expect from your game. (frankly I’m anxious for an FPS style MMO ala Huxley A. cause FPS you can still scare the bejesus out of players and B. I don’t think I’ll ever see the birth of Huxley anytime soon =( or a beautiful MMOFPS)
The closer to Dead Rising you get, and farther from Left3Dead, the better
Can’t wait for the PS3 version
Thanks for all the comments and good vibes, folks. I’ll keep a watch on the questions you ask and try to write a summary post with some answers in the next day or two.
Aw come on man. Console only? You should be making it cross platform for something like this. I’ve been waiting for a Zombie MMO for a long time, but now my PS3 is fried. Good luck with it I guess.
My friends and I have been waiting for a game like this for years. We’ve talked through the whole thing before — bases, level systems, and of course fast vs. slow zombies (I’d love to see some medium-speed ones, as in they move quickly once they know you’re there, but really, how fast can something move with rotten legs?).
This would be so awesome. If you put up a place for ideas anytime soon I’ll be one of the first to post.
I am so excited; good luck!
Oh very nice, I’ve been wanting to see a zombie MMO for awhile. The idea I had was that you, as a survivor can go to a building and barricade it and scrounge up (respawning) materials like food, ammo, or weapons, to help your character stay fed and alive. If you die, you switch sides and become a zombie and try to kill survivors… after a day or two as a zombie (or logged out), you could opt to become alive again if you wanted to.
Another feature i thought about would be that your character would stay in play for a period of time after you log off…
I would love to see what kind of game gets made out of this though. This is one kind of MMO that seems like it would work but hasn’t really been done yet. I’m definitely gonna keep looking at this.
On behalf of zombies everywhere I would beseech you to pay attention to “the zombie survival guide”, in particular the section that talks about the speed at which zombies are capable of moving. We are SLOW!
I think being transparent during the development process with day by day input will keep every idea fresh, this is fun!
this is a dream come true. if done right this may be the GREATEST game ever. Even better then RE4 or fallout 3. speaking of which i think fallout 3 would be a good basis for how you play the game. you can play in either first or third person and the control were phenomenal.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I’m thinking “Grand Theft Auto meets L4D…” I’ll be following this closely [gets out his zombie survival guide] Can’t wait.