The web seems to be a flutter of a new gaming company aptly titled Undead Labs. Their goal is to create a massive multiplayer game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic nightmare whereby players must work together to survive or be zombie chow. The initial concept sounds very intriguing. From the article:

“One of the things that is key in [the zombie] genre is really giving players a sense of purpose that is not just kill monsters and level up,” he tells us. “MMO players like to have a home, and that is one of the reasons I’m not going to throw them out into a post apocolyptic world. The goal here is to make them feel like there is a purpose. You’re trying to restart society. You’re trying to reclaim the world. One of the very first goals is going to be to get together with other players and establish a place that you can call your own that you must actively maintain and defend, and that over time will allow you to have a home base that will allow you to restart the economy, start trading with other ‘blue zones’ and feel like you have a home again.”

I’ve played a few of these MMOs in my time and my biggest complaint is the static nature of the world. Players just have no influence in the game world. I could spend years developing my alternative persona and get to know every other player in the game, but the game world itself will still be unchanged from the day I arrived in it.

This sounds like a move in the right direction, but as always, it’s all about the implementation. I look forward to seeing what zombies shamble out of Undead Labs in the coming years. As usual, I’ll post the news as I have it.

Update … if you want to play a zombie MMO right now … check out Brain Chef. It’s free and fun to play.

Jeff Strain talks Undead Labs and its console zombie MMO (destructoid.com <- new window)