Undead, not fun-dead: A brief history of the playable zombie in video games

So we must look back, and further afield, to find our ideal shambling candidates. Specifically, I’m looking for games that really try to put the player into the zombie lack-of-mindset, and not just use the undead as a template for more traditional offerings. For instance, I’d argue that, as much fun as it is to play as the Zombie team in Valve’s online Left 4 Dead games, the actual experience of playing as those 28 Days Later-fast killing machines—with, arguably, the sole exception of the lumbering, constantly vomiting Boomer—doesn’t actually match-up with our core understanding of zombie-dom all that well. 

I’d also like to avoid focusing too much on arguments of zombiehood that you could, uncharitably, characterize as the “Yes, Okay, That’s Technically Correct” school of internet argumentation. To pick an example out of the irritating ether: Yes, okay, it’s technically correct that the characters you play as in most of From Software’s Dark Souls games are some manner of Undead—even if those games’ abjectly depressing cosmologies raise some questions about what “Undead” even means. But given how mobile and low-key ambitious you end up being in the Souls games (and the thematically similar Elden Ring), I’d still argue that they rarely play like games about being a zombie. You can also consider yourself preemptively acknowledged, spoiler warriors who want to talk about Resident Evils 7 and 8, Dead Island 2, or any other game where it turns out your player character has been hiding their undead inclinations all along.

Looking back at the grand history of gore-soaked gaming, there is one early and obvious contender, though: 2005’s Stubbs The Zombie In Rebel Without A Pulse. Released by studio Wideload Games in the midst of one of gaming’s periodic growth spurts of subversiveness—this was the same year that gave us the similar “Playable B-Movie but you’re the monster” Destroy All Humans!—Stubbs checks a lot of the boxes the would-be brainmuncher might be looking for. Your playable zombie buddy, Stubbs, shambles around a 1950s-style town, happily devouring its inhabitants; his abilities all rely on the fact that he’s an ambulatory dead guy capable of turning other currently living humans into same; hell, in a bold movie against annoyingness (especially noteworthy for this era of gaming), he has the sheer dignity to not make constant quips, instead restraining himself to a simple “Brains.” (Including, somewhat famously, in a bit referencing Patton, every 2000s-era Xbox owner’s favorite comedy reference point.) 

For a pure expression of zombiness, he’s probably hard to beat, especially since the game got a semi-modern re-release just five years ago for anyone currently wanting to scratch that skull-cracking itch. (Meanwhile, it’s also fun to remember that this game, despite being pretty tame and cartoonish in its depiction of violence, got hit with one of those periodic bouts of gaming moral panic that opportunistic politicians gin up every few years—forcing Wideload to issue a straight-faced statement clarifying that zombies aren’t engaging in “cannibalism,” because they aren’t human anymore.)

But zombie-ism is, of course, a big, bloody tent. And while Stubbs embodies the surface principles of zombie schlock, delivering an early Romero-jolt of goofy undead action, he doesn’t necessarily worm his way deep into the rotting heart of ideas associated with playing as a card-carrying member of the undead horde. For that, more often than not, we have to turn to the world of multiplayer games, which are frequently a lot happier to let players play a minor cog in the machinery of evil. There’s the recent trend of asymmetric horror movie-based games, for instance; while we’re not touching, with a two-foot machete, the whole “Does Jason Voorhees count as a zombie?” debate, games like the since-shuttered Evil Dead multiplayer game let the player controlling the Evil take control of individual Deadites, which made for an enjoyable “Throwing yourself into the thresher, just hoping to get one nasty hit on those smug human bastards” gameplay. 

The king of this sort of “hell is other people pretending to be zombies” chaos, though, is also, sadly, now defunct: Kevan Davis’ fascinating 2000s-born browser game Urban Dead. Although technically not all that different from the MUDs and MUSHes that formed the Wild West of early massively multiplayer gaming—text-based worlds where you were nevertheless able to interact with other players, kind of like a chat room, with swords—Urban Dead distinguished itself both by its theming, and the surprisingly rich sociology that developed around it. With players self-sorting into either zombie or human camps, the game (which, in practice, mostly played out with players clicking around to move between connected rooms and trade resources or, possibly, gunfire with the “people” inside them) developed its own robust culture over two decades of online life. 

The tales of self-appointed rescue squads, or bounty hunters who would seek to punish in-game criminals, or huge sieges where survivors would have to band together to try to hold in-game shopping malls while massive coordinated teams of zombies attempted to storm the barricades, are the stuff of early MMO legend. Part of the fun of the game, meanwhile, was that it could play into the fantasy of scale that is inherent to the zombie apocalypse: Enough players were able to run around in its simplistic world to make you feel like you were part of a horde, or about to be messily devoured by one, years before technological advances made 3D zombie games like Capcom’s Dead Rising plausible. Against all odds, and in the face of evolutionary leaps in the gaming landscape surrounding it, Urban Dead actually managed to hang on into 2024, before changing laws surrounding online age verification made its single-person dev team give up the ghost; it remains one of the most interesting exemplars ever in the playable zombie sciences.

On the other hand, though, you also have 1990 NES game Zombie Nation, a game that lets you play as a giant undead disembodied samurai head flying across New York, blowing up an evil version of the Statue Of Liberty that’d been turned by aliens into a sort of democracy-hating Medusa; that’s also a pretty cool thing for a zombie to do. It’s your pick, honestly: Zombies, after all, are like any pop culture monster, insofar as they’re only as cool as the ideas that artists and creators imbue them with; it’s that care and thoughtfulness for our brain-deficient buddies that makes them so much fun to slaughter—and, occasionally, be.