I grew up in the small Central Texas town of Temple. Never heard of it? Most people haven’t. It’s about an hour north of Austin, and about half an hour south of Waco. You remember Waco, right? Yep, that’s my childhood stomping ground. That’s where I learned to play D&D, fell in love with video games, saw Dawn of the Dead for the first time, and pushed wheeled trashcans full of day-old Mexican food down the alley behind the restaurant with my car at 40 mph because there was nothing else to do.
Sigh. Good times.
Temple isn’t exactly the glitzy metropolis you’d expect to see in a game. If I’m donning my cape, mask, and lightning fists to take on some evil supervillains, I want to be somewhere sexy like Paragon City or Tokyo. If I’m taking up my two-handed mace to get my Paladin on, I expect the best chance to be admired is somewhere densely populated like Stormwind or Paris. When I suit up in my NFL-designed space marine combat armor, I look forward to dishing it out to the bugs on their homeworld of X’zzzt.
But the zed apocalypse? Forget the cities and the flashy locales — many of us will be holding back the rotting hordes in small towns just like Temple.