Rise of the Zombie

After spending the late eighties and early nineties at the unfashionable end of the horror ghetto, zombies are now doing big business. We've seen zombie movies undergo a renaissance, while on the fringes of cult obsession you'll find zombie flash mobs, zombie proms and... oh yes: zombie games.

There's an obvious turning point for all this zombie action in the form of Capcom's first Resident Evil game (Biohazard in Japan), released on Sony's Playstation in 1996. Taking heavy atmospheric cues from Infogrames' polygon-based proto-survial-horror adventure Alone in the Dark (1992), Resident Evil was an instant classic thanks to tense gameplay, stunning level design and a zombie plague that seems to deliver nods to Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead films, with their zombie-making chemical, Trioxin.

In the same year, Sega's House of the Dead light gun shooter appeared in the arcades. From there, there was no looking back. Both games spawned numerous sequels and spin-offs.

In 2001, the fourth instalment in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movie franchise came out. Starring the voice talents of the series' star, Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead: Hail to the King existed only as a video game, taking its cue from Capcom's hit survival horror titles. It was followed in 2003 by a sequel, A Fistful of Boomstick, which received rather more critical acclaim. However, the repetitive nature of its deadite-killing mayhem failed to win the love of gamers who weren't already die-hard fans of the movies.

Serious cross-pollination between zombie films and games had begun. In 2002 Danny Boyle's movie 28 Days Later (2002) gave birth to fast zombies and a new cult interest in the genre. 2002 also saw the release of the first Resident Evil movie. Zom-rom-com Shaun of the Dead, released in 2004, was spawned from an episode of British sit-com Spaced that was itself heavily influenced by Resident Evil 2.

The Resident Evil sequels continued their domination of the gaming charts, while a 2006 Capcom release, third-person sandbox action game Dead Rising, provided a significantly wider range of weapons than the company's hit zombie franchise, with less emphasis on plot and tension and more on baseball bat/chainsaw/lawnmower based zombie death.

All this carnage is great, but the majority of these titles (House of the Dead notwithstanding) have offered a singularly solitary gaming experience. It's just you against the zombies. While this helps with the apocalyptic feel of the games, the experience lacks the band-of-doomed-survivors vibe that features so strongly in pretty much every zombie movie ever.

And then there's Valve's Left 4 Dead. Released just a year ago, this co-op FPS shooter pitted four survivors against the undead hordes across four campaigns with five areas. There's a single player mode, in which you're backed up by three computer-controlled allies, but the real meat of the game is in online co-op. You can even play with up to seven other human beings in Versus mode, which pits the Survivors against the Infected. We loved it, despite our reservations about the limited number of campaigns. Valve obligingly released additional content and, within the year, a sequel.



We've been playing the full version of Left 4 Dead 2 for about a week now. It's more of the same, which is by no means a bad thing. The graphics are primitive compared to the majestic realism of games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, but that's hardly the point. Left 4 Dead 2 has bigger levels, new zombies with new attack patterns and, our favourite: melee weapons. You haven't lived until you've decapitated a zombie with a skillet (and if your reflexes aren't sharp enough to do so, we don't rate your survival prospects very far into the future).

In a world where even respected (*ahem*) computer journalists can succumb to the the call of the flesh, do you really think that you'll be far behind?