Corey Bowman remembers when the zombies first went after him.
In 2008, long before he had 1.13 million subscribers to his Call of Duty YouTube channel (where he goes by the moniker Inkslasher), Bowman was a high school student when he beat his first-ever Call of Duty game, Call of Duty: World at War on Xbox 360.
While the game ends its primary story in predictable fashion – with triumphant symphonies and images of valor in World War II – the end credits abruptly drops players into something eldritch and otherworldly. They suddenly see their avatar wake up in an abandoned bunker in a foggy corner of the Pacific, and that’s when the titles appear on screen in blood red typeface: “Nazi Zombies.” The objective now isn’t to win the war, but survive.
“I didn’t know zombies existed in the game,” Bowman remembers about the surprise feature. “You beat the game thinking it’s a normal campaign. All of a sudden, it puts you into Zombies. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know it was even part of the game until it popped up.”
Bowman’s lasting impression of the experience were also informed by vivid memories from his childhood of watching George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead while on a family vacation. And despite it only being 2008, it was still a nascent era for social media, particularly YouTube. Bowman points out that it was a time when audiences could still be taken by surprise. “You didn’t have everyone posting everything on Reddit. It wasn’t people on Twitter going, ‘Get ready for zombies!’”
It was also the late 2000s, when zombies rose from the grave as the genre du jour of the time; movies like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the Dawn of the Dead remake contributed to pop culture’s zombie outbreak. A couple of years after Bowman’s shock experience came the television phenomenon The Walking Dead.
Since the release of Call of Duty: World at War, unloading ammo into the undead has become a popular recurring feature that stands out amid the wider Call of Duty franchise. It’s still present today, 15 years after its initial debut, in both the standalone Call of Duty: Warzone battle royale spinoff and in the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 as a brand new, open-world PVE experience.
“You beat the game thinking it’s a normal campaign. All of a sudden, it puts you into Zombies. ”
But how and why does Call of Duty’s Zombies keep coming back like a virulent infection? How can a glorified add-on feature of a blockbuster video game franchise maintain its own fandom? Longtime fans of Call of Duty, like Inklsasher and actor/filmmaker Stephen Ford, tell IGN that the killer combination of the series’ signature shooting mechanics combined with the sheer visceral fun of killing zombies means it will always be popular even when zombies have decayed from mainstream tastes.
“Other zombie media, I don’t care about them anymore. But I will play Call of Duty Zombies every time it comes out. I know people that buy Call of Duty just to play Zombies,” says Ford, who is best known for his roles in shows like Private Practice and Teen Wolf.
Initially envisioned by developer studio Treyarch as the type of tower defense-style game that was prevalent on Flash sites, Call of Duty’s Zombies typically challenge players (anywhere between 1-4) to start out with meager supplies in a minimally-protected safe zone. By killing zombies, players accrue in-game currency to obtain upgrades, including better weapons and stronger defenses. This gameplay loop proved to be instantly addictive and remains strong 15 years after its initial debut.
The creation of Zombies had rather serendipitous beginnings. In a personal blog post dated November 11, 2008, Jesse Snyder, creator of Zombies in World at War, wrote that it was all pretty much an accident. During the development process, Treyarch wanted a fun extra in the spirit of the memorable airplane level in the franchise’s previous mega-hit, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, developed by Infinity Ward. (The Call of Duty series is historically handled by different studios assigned to specific titles, with Treyarch one of several.)
Their first idea was to let players experience the Invasion of Normandy from the German side of the trenches, but the developers very reasonably nixed that idea. One day, Snyder wrote, someone pointed out that an animation of Japanese soldiers being dazed by rocket strikes “looked like zombies.”
Separately, Snyder was interested in subverting the series’ expectations about survival and resolution. “I still really liked the concept of being over run [sic] and not really being able to win,” Snyder wrote on his blog. “One thing that is common in most Call of Duty games is the feeling that you’re invincible, that when things go wrong you’ll be okay, and that everyone lives to see the next day.”
Snyder pitched to Treyarch producer Dan Bunting the idea of a tower defense minigame. Because the concept was both addictive to play and easy to put together, Snyder thought “doing our own version” would be “a pretty big hit.”
Bunting passed on Snyder’s idea, but Snyder was sure it could work. The final piece came when a fellow designer introduced Snyder to a Flash zombie defense game, The Last Stand. Wrote Snyder on his blog:
“Zombies run towards you and start tearing at a large barricade that is protecting your area. If they break through, you’re pretty much toast, so you move around in your little section of the screen shooting various guns to try to keep them from breaking in. The rules are pretty standard for a tower defense game but with some cool twists. After every round, you get some points which you can spend on building back your barricade, looking for survivors, and looking for new weapons. So depending on how you play, you might choose to get a new weapon, or more people to help you defend, or simply build up your defenses.
“So, I played a few rounds and had a huge epiphany.”
In IGN’s original review of World at War, critic Jason Ocampo simply described the feature as a “silly-yet-fun bonus” and “icing on the cake.” Surely few could have known just how huge Zombies would eventually become.
After its inclusion in World at War, Zombies returned as a more robust co-operative feature in the 2010 title Call of Duty: Black Ops with more maps and different characters. (Amusingly, one of the maps is the Pentagon; players control historical figures John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, and Fidel Castro, whose off-the-record negotiation session is interrupted by a zombie outbreak.) In stark contrast to Call of Duty’s tonally serious presentation of geopolitical conflict in its main story campaigns, Zombies almost always takes on a satirical, grindhouse movie vibe; Hollywood celebrities like Bruce Campbell, Ron Perlman, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Robert Englund, Jeff Goldblum, and many more have lent their likeness as player avatars.
While zombies are no longer a red-hot subgenre in the wider culture, Call of Duty impressively keeps interest in its Zombies mode alive. The series regularly resurrects to tremendous fanfare; its many appearances are in titles like Call of Duty: Ghosts, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Call of Duty: WWII, Call of Duty: Vanguard, and in every installment of the Black Ops sub-series.
Ford, an avid player of Zombies since Black Ops, believes there’s an elegant simplicity that has contributed to its lasting appeal. Combined with the series’ signature fine-tuned shooting mechanics, the targets being zombies lets players indulge in “guilt-free violence.”
“The reason people are addicted is kind of the simplicity,” Ford says. “You get a certain satisfaction seeing zombies die. ‘They’re dead anyway, so kill them all!’” He also adds that zombies are a “palette cleanser” that jolts the player after experiencing heavy storytelling in the main game. “The thing with Call of Duty is they get big and bombastic, very Michael Bay, with like geopolitical intrigue. It gets very intense.” With Zombies, Ford says, it’s like “blowing off steam.”
Zombies almost always takes on a satirical, grindhouse movie vibe; Hollywood celebrities like Bruce Campbell, Ron Perlman, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Robert Englund, Jeff Goldblum, and many more have lent their likeness as player avatars.
Bowman offers his own insight on how Zombies still keeps fans’ attention.
“When they integrate it with a good story and good characters, that’s what pulls me in,” he says. “When it first started it was this mystery, it threw you in and you’re trying to figure what the heck is going on while there’s all these zombies. That was the part that pulled me in.”
As Inkslasher, Bowman says that he sees players always intrigued by the connections between the main story and the Zombies mode. “The thing I focus on [with] my channel is the story of the game, and between the campaign and the zombies, there always tends to be this gap,” Bowman points out. “People ask if things are canon. I think they do that with Zombies, they leave things open-ended so they can try to figure them out. [That’s how] it started getting its own cult following.”
After 15 years, Call of Duty is trying something new with Zombies in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Neither Bowman nor Ford know what to expect except that they’ll try it out. “I think it’s important for games to do [something] new,” says Bowman, “It’s just when you have something that’s been a staple like this, and you mess it up, the cult following is going to be very angry.”
“I think it’s a perfect mix of nostalgia,” observes Ford about Zombies’ ongoing popularity. “Most of us playing COD now are in our 20s and 30s. We played Zombies when we were pretty young [in this] golden era of gaming. It’s nostalgia for this time when the game was huge, when zombies were huge, and staying up ‘till 4 a.m. with no responsibilities. Combine that with the challenge element – ‘Let’s get to level whatever’ – it’s why we keep coming back to it. It’s comforting.”
Adds Ford, “Every year we get a new Call of Duty, and there’s always something people complain about. But we go to Zombies and go, ‘It’s Zombies.’ It’s the way it’s always been.”
Eric Francisco is a freelancer writer.
Continue reading...
In 2008, long before he had 1.13 million subscribers to his Call of Duty YouTube channel (where he goes by the moniker Inkslasher), Bowman was a high school student when he beat his first-ever Call of Duty game, Call of Duty: World at War on Xbox 360.
While the game ends its primary story in predictable fashion – with triumphant symphonies and images of valor in World War II – the end credits abruptly drops players into something eldritch and otherworldly. They suddenly see their avatar wake up in an abandoned bunker in a foggy corner of the Pacific, and that’s when the titles appear on screen in blood red typeface: “Nazi Zombies.” The objective now isn’t to win the war, but survive.
“I didn’t know zombies existed in the game,” Bowman remembers about the surprise feature. “You beat the game thinking it’s a normal campaign. All of a sudden, it puts you into Zombies. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know it was even part of the game until it popped up.”
Bowman’s lasting impression of the experience were also informed by vivid memories from his childhood of watching George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead while on a family vacation. And despite it only being 2008, it was still a nascent era for social media, particularly YouTube. Bowman points out that it was a time when audiences could still be taken by surprise. “You didn’t have everyone posting everything on Reddit. It wasn’t people on Twitter going, ‘Get ready for zombies!’”
It was also the late 2000s, when zombies rose from the grave as the genre du jour of the time; movies like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the Dawn of the Dead remake contributed to pop culture’s zombie outbreak. A couple of years after Bowman’s shock experience came the television phenomenon The Walking Dead.
Since the release of Call of Duty: World at War, unloading ammo into the undead has become a popular recurring feature that stands out amid the wider Call of Duty franchise. It’s still present today, 15 years after its initial debut, in both the standalone Call of Duty: Warzone battle royale spinoff and in the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 as a brand new, open-world PVE experience.
“You beat the game thinking it’s a normal campaign. All of a sudden, it puts you into Zombies. ”
But how and why does Call of Duty’s Zombies keep coming back like a virulent infection? How can a glorified add-on feature of a blockbuster video game franchise maintain its own fandom? Longtime fans of Call of Duty, like Inklsasher and actor/filmmaker Stephen Ford, tell IGN that the killer combination of the series’ signature shooting mechanics combined with the sheer visceral fun of killing zombies means it will always be popular even when zombies have decayed from mainstream tastes.
“Other zombie media, I don’t care about them anymore. But I will play Call of Duty Zombies every time it comes out. I know people that buy Call of Duty just to play Zombies,” says Ford, who is best known for his roles in shows like Private Practice and Teen Wolf.
Initially envisioned by developer studio Treyarch as the type of tower defense-style game that was prevalent on Flash sites, Call of Duty’s Zombies typically challenge players (anywhere between 1-4) to start out with meager supplies in a minimally-protected safe zone. By killing zombies, players accrue in-game currency to obtain upgrades, including better weapons and stronger defenses. This gameplay loop proved to be instantly addictive and remains strong 15 years after its initial debut.
The creation of Zombies had rather serendipitous beginnings. In a personal blog post dated November 11, 2008, Jesse Snyder, creator of Zombies in World at War, wrote that it was all pretty much an accident. During the development process, Treyarch wanted a fun extra in the spirit of the memorable airplane level in the franchise’s previous mega-hit, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, developed by Infinity Ward. (The Call of Duty series is historically handled by different studios assigned to specific titles, with Treyarch one of several.)
Their first idea was to let players experience the Invasion of Normandy from the German side of the trenches, but the developers very reasonably nixed that idea. One day, Snyder wrote, someone pointed out that an animation of Japanese soldiers being dazed by rocket strikes “looked like zombies.”
Separately, Snyder was interested in subverting the series’ expectations about survival and resolution. “I still really liked the concept of being over run [sic] and not really being able to win,” Snyder wrote on his blog. “One thing that is common in most Call of Duty games is the feeling that you’re invincible, that when things go wrong you’ll be okay, and that everyone lives to see the next day.”
Snyder pitched to Treyarch producer Dan Bunting the idea of a tower defense minigame. Because the concept was both addictive to play and easy to put together, Snyder thought “doing our own version” would be “a pretty big hit.”
Bunting passed on Snyder’s idea, but Snyder was sure it could work. The final piece came when a fellow designer introduced Snyder to a Flash zombie defense game, The Last Stand. Wrote Snyder on his blog:
“Zombies run towards you and start tearing at a large barricade that is protecting your area. If they break through, you’re pretty much toast, so you move around in your little section of the screen shooting various guns to try to keep them from breaking in. The rules are pretty standard for a tower defense game but with some cool twists. After every round, you get some points which you can spend on building back your barricade, looking for survivors, and looking for new weapons. So depending on how you play, you might choose to get a new weapon, or more people to help you defend, or simply build up your defenses.
“So, I played a few rounds and had a huge epiphany.”
In IGN’s original review of World at War, critic Jason Ocampo simply described the feature as a “silly-yet-fun bonus” and “icing on the cake.” Surely few could have known just how huge Zombies would eventually become.
After its inclusion in World at War, Zombies returned as a more robust co-operative feature in the 2010 title Call of Duty: Black Ops with more maps and different characters. (Amusingly, one of the maps is the Pentagon; players control historical figures John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, and Fidel Castro, whose off-the-record negotiation session is interrupted by a zombie outbreak.) In stark contrast to Call of Duty’s tonally serious presentation of geopolitical conflict in its main story campaigns, Zombies almost always takes on a satirical, grindhouse movie vibe; Hollywood celebrities like Bruce Campbell, Ron Perlman, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Robert Englund, Jeff Goldblum, and many more have lent their likeness as player avatars.
While zombies are no longer a red-hot subgenre in the wider culture, Call of Duty impressively keeps interest in its Zombies mode alive. The series regularly resurrects to tremendous fanfare; its many appearances are in titles like Call of Duty: Ghosts, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Call of Duty: WWII, Call of Duty: Vanguard, and in every installment of the Black Ops sub-series.
Ford, an avid player of Zombies since Black Ops, believes there’s an elegant simplicity that has contributed to its lasting appeal. Combined with the series’ signature fine-tuned shooting mechanics, the targets being zombies lets players indulge in “guilt-free violence.”
“The reason people are addicted is kind of the simplicity,” Ford says. “You get a certain satisfaction seeing zombies die. ‘They’re dead anyway, so kill them all!’” He also adds that zombies are a “palette cleanser” that jolts the player after experiencing heavy storytelling in the main game. “The thing with Call of Duty is they get big and bombastic, very Michael Bay, with like geopolitical intrigue. It gets very intense.” With Zombies, Ford says, it’s like “blowing off steam.”
Zombies almost always takes on a satirical, grindhouse movie vibe; Hollywood celebrities like Bruce Campbell, Ron Perlman, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Robert Englund, Jeff Goldblum, and many more have lent their likeness as player avatars.
Bowman offers his own insight on how Zombies still keeps fans’ attention.
“When they integrate it with a good story and good characters, that’s what pulls me in,” he says. “When it first started it was this mystery, it threw you in and you’re trying to figure what the heck is going on while there’s all these zombies. That was the part that pulled me in.”
As Inkslasher, Bowman says that he sees players always intrigued by the connections between the main story and the Zombies mode. “The thing I focus on [with] my channel is the story of the game, and between the campaign and the zombies, there always tends to be this gap,” Bowman points out. “People ask if things are canon. I think they do that with Zombies, they leave things open-ended so they can try to figure them out. [That’s how] it started getting its own cult following.”
After 15 years, Call of Duty is trying something new with Zombies in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Neither Bowman nor Ford know what to expect except that they’ll try it out. “I think it’s important for games to do [something] new,” says Bowman, “It’s just when you have something that’s been a staple like this, and you mess it up, the cult following is going to be very angry.”
“I think it’s a perfect mix of nostalgia,” observes Ford about Zombies’ ongoing popularity. “Most of us playing COD now are in our 20s and 30s. We played Zombies when we were pretty young [in this] golden era of gaming. It’s nostalgia for this time when the game was huge, when zombies were huge, and staying up ‘till 4 a.m. with no responsibilities. Combine that with the challenge element – ‘Let’s get to level whatever’ – it’s why we keep coming back to it. It’s comforting.”
Adds Ford, “Every year we get a new Call of Duty, and there’s always something people complain about. But we go to Zombies and go, ‘It’s Zombies.’ It’s the way it’s always been.”
Eric Francisco is a freelancer writer.
Continue reading...
