Zombies. There’s no escaping them, and while that rule has remained true since 1968, when George A. Romero’s first gifted us with a little indie film called Night of the Living Dead. The rule applies whether you’re a character in a zombie movie or in the theater watching it. Since they first shambled onto the silver screen, the undead hordes have gone on to permeate literally every facet of entertainment — especially video games, where gamers have made thinning their reanimated ranks a national pastime.
One of the (many) reasons why they’ve become such a popular moving target in video games is because they’re so much fun to kill.
Dropping a ghoul is substantially less naughty than killing a human, and there are few scenarios that can match the intensity of being trapped in a room or building that’s been surrounded by scores of them. As much as I enjoy vanquishing them, sometimes, the classic Romero archetype can get tiresome. Thankfully, video games have come up with the antidote to that.
Much like the virus that probably created them, zombies have never stopped evolving. Today, the term can be used to describe a wide array of creatures we’ve been trained to kill in video games. It’s no longer limited to the moaning, flesh-hungry walking corpse that many of us grew up with.
Resident Evil is a prime example of this, as the series has continued to welcome new twists on the idea of the “zombie” (admittedly to mixed results). This is why I’ve decided to come up with a list of games that weren’t afraid to innovate with their undead.
