Undead Labs

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For seven years, I headed up game design at ArenaNet, working with a family of friends to create the Guild Wars games. I am tremendously proud of the work we did together and of the world that millions of players have lived in and enjoyed.

Still, when the opportunity came to join Jeff at Undead Labs, I didn’t hesitate. I knew I could do so safely. Guild Wars 2 is well in hand. Eric Flannum has been at the helm as lead designer for more than a year now, taking the concepts we developed at the start of the project and bringing them to life. He and I are long-time friends and partners-in-crime, working together on Warcraft II, Diablo, Starcraft, Sacrifice, and every Guild Wars release to date. I have complete confidence in the game that he and the team will make.

I am ready for a new challenge, and this is the perfect opportunity to do something groundbreaking and amazing. Console zombie-survival MMO. If your heart doesn’t race a little at the possibilities, check to make sure you’ve got a pulse at all.

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And Now A Word From Our Team

Today is a momentous day at Undead Labs. Over the past few months we’ve been quietly refining our design, working out the core systems, and — most importantly — building the most ass-kicking zombie-slaying game development team ever assembled. Over the next few weeks I’ll be introducing the entire team to you; including our inbound art director Doug Williams, who painted the tasty image attached to this post.

Today, we start with my long-time friend and colleague James Phinney.

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This Will Never Work

Welcome to the year 2000 2010. As you know, our Big Plan is to bring the best elements of the first-person shooter massively multiplayer online game genre to the console platform.

I know, you’ve heard this before. I know you are not impressed, because every time you hear this it either never happens, or you get a weak port of an otherwise excellent PC title that does not feel at all like a true console game, and then the publisher expresses amazement that it was not successful and blames the console platform. It happens every time, and now “they” are saying that FPS MMO games are just simply better suited to the PC, and that console developers should just give up and go build more Tomb Raider and Madden sequels.

We hear you, console fans. But this time it’s going to be different, because we are willing to chart a bold course and develop an FPS MMO specifically for consoles, which will allow us to take advantage of the unique features of the platform and give you a true console experience. The pundits still say we’re crazy, and that it will never work. I guess we’ll be able to look back in ten years and know who was right.

So, let’s talk about some of these “unique features” of a console FPS MMO…

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Building A New Kind Of MMO Aint Like Dustin’ Crops

I don’t know. Dusting crops sounds kind of like hard work to me. I mean, what is the “dust” anyway? Is it okay to breathe it? Or maybe crop dust can be a source of zombie plague…

In any case, we’d sure rather be making games than dusting crops, differences in difficulty notwithstanding.

We’ve been very busy this spring getting the financing for our studio lined up and refining the core game design. The good news is that we are almost across the finish line, and we’ll soon be able to announce our partner and start giving you more details on the design and development of the world’s first MMOZ.

It’s going to be an exciting summer at Undead Labs. Thanks for your patience, and stay tuned.

Jeff

Kill Ten Zombies

Kill Ten Rats’ Ravious sent Jeff a list of questions about Undead Labs, zombies, MMOs, sunshine, and a hardball question about the imminent threat of velociraptors. Head over to the Kill Ten Rats blog and read the full interview.

You can watch an excellent movie like Land of the Lost and leave the theater thinking, “Man, that could really happen!” whereas with mediocre, unrealistic movies like 28 Days Later you leave thinking, “Bioengineered viruses that don’t work exactly as planned. What a complete joke.”