Well it's October, and that means Halloween is coming. Its a time that we celebrate the things that scare us all in the name of good fun, Whether that be vampires, witches, werewolves, demons, mummies, the list goes on. But one monster type that has been popular for a very long time is zombies.
The concept of the dead rising from the grave to eat the flesh the living being only stopped by a bullet or weapon to the brain has become a common staple of the horror genera and in pop culture. Zombies have been featured in all sorts of media, from movies, to tv shows, to books, to of course video games.
Resident Evil, The House of the Dead, Silent Hill, Dead Rising, Dead Island, Left 4 Dead, Dying Light, State of Decay, The Last of Us and the Call of Duty series, all of these game franchises have used zombies to great success.
But the idea of using zombies in video games goes way back. The earliest video game to focus on zombies was Quicksilva's Zombie Zombie for the ZX Spectrum, released in 1984, which was a sequel/reskin of Ant Attack. While not really that special or having much depth, one start up game company used used zombies for their first game that not only became a successful first start, but paved the way for that company to become one of the biggest video game publishers in the world, that game was ZOMBI by Ubisoft.
Released in 1986, it was Ubisoft first ever game to be released to the public. Long before Assassin's Creed, before Raving Rabbids, and even before Rayman, The French company got their start by releasing this simple point and click adventure game. However the story behind the game technically stretches back a full 18 years earlier with a film flop turned cult classic that both gave way to the modern zombie and a sequel that gave inspiration for the game.
The story of Zombi begins not in 1967 France, but in 1967 America, with a young film director named George A. Romero.
Romero began his career in the film industry staring back in the late 1950's while attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After graduating in 1960, He and his friends John Russo, and Russell Streiner, founded a production company called The Latent Image which produced television commercials and industrial films.
While the business was profitable, by 1967 the trio grew bored of making commercials and had the idea to film a horror movie. Under the title Monster Flick, Russo pitched two ideas, one was a horror comedy in which adolescent aliens who visit Earth and befriend human teenagers, and a proper horror film in which a young man who runs away from home and discovers rotting human corpses that aliens use for food scattered across a meadow, the second script evolved into a third script that would involve reanimated corpses. Romero took the second idea and inspired by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, created a survival story in which seven people get in farmhouse, which is under assault by an enlarging group of flesh-eating, undead corpses which Romero referred to as ghouls, but what we would today identify as zombies.
While the term zombie existed at the time, it wasn't used in the modern sense. The idea of zombies trace back to the folklore of Haitian Vodou in the 16th century. Zombies themselves in films prior to this came in three types, Traditional Voodoo zombies (mindless slaves under control of an evil power) such as in White Zombie (1932), alien zombies (dead resurrected by aliens for world domination) such as in Plan 9 From Outer Space and Invisible Invaders (1959), and vampire zombies, (zombies that have the weaknesses of vampires and are more intelligent) such as Last Man On Earth (1964).
After production in late 1967, the film premiered on October 1, 1968 as Night of the Living Dead in the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
However initial reactions of the film were negative, due to the shocking tone and gorey violence. The film actually came out just one month before the MPAA rating system was put in place, so as a result the film was seen by preteens and children which generated a lot of controversy.
Despite the controversy, the film was a box office success earning between $12 and $15 million at the U.S. box office after a decade, and as time went on it gained a cult following and acclaim among critics. It's widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made, as well as identified as the first modern zombie film, with the basic design of the zombies in the film being the basis for the zombies we see in horror films today.
10 years later, in 1978, Romero released a sequel called Dawn of the Dead. which made a few changes, being in color, with a new cast and a new setting.
The plot is pretty much the same concept of the first film, a group of people hide out and have to survive a zombie outbreak. but rather than hide out in a farmhouse like the first film, here they hide out in a shopping mall.
Which is a good idea, not only from a situational perspective, as the mall can provide food, clothing, shelter, and weapons, but also can also provide great scenarios and be can used for comedic effect like this pie scene for example:
Aside from the situational perspective and comedic elements, the mall setting has also been seen as social satire comparing mall shoppers to zombies.
Another big change from the first film are the characters. In the first film the survivors try to work together but end up fighting, but in Dawn of the Dead what happens is the opposite, the characters start off hostile toward each other, but end up becoming friends and teaming up to fight off the zombies.
The effects is also something that has been overhauled, with bright red blood and dismemberment being a common sight throughout the film. The special effects were the early work of Tom Savini who also has an acting role in the film as a leader of a motorcycle gang. today he's one of the most famous faces in the horror movie business.
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The film first premiered On September 1, 1978, in Turin, Italy, March 27, 1979 in Japan, and April 7, 1979 in the US at the USA Film Festival in Dallas, Texas, with full theatrical releases in New York City and Los Angeles following on April 13, 1979.
The film proved to be a major success at the box office, grossing $66 million worldwide against its estimated budget of $640,000. Dawn of the Dead had a better initial reception than it's predecessor, and received widespread critical acclaim since its initial release. Like its predecessor, it has garnered a large, international cult following and has also been listed as one of the greatest films ever made.
Meanwhile in Brittany, France The five Guillemot brothers – Christian, Claude, Gérard, Michel, and Yves were helping with the family farmer support business with the idea of diversification to sell other products to farmers; Claude began with selling CDs, and later computers with additional software including video games.
By the mid 80s, the company was earning about 40 million French francs (roughly US$5.8 million at that time). It was so successful that In 1985, the brothers established Guillemot Corporation for similar distribution of computer hardware.
As demand grew, the brothers recognized that video game software was becoming a lucrative property and wanted to get into the industry's development side, already having insight on the publication and distribution side. The result was Ubi Soft, founded on March 28, 1986, with the name "Ubi Soft" being selected to represent "ubiquitous" software.
For their first title, they made a point and click, action game that took inspiration from Dawn of the Dead. The name may actually come from the European title for the film which was also called Zombi.
The game was first released in 1986, exclusively in France, for the the most popular computer in France at the time, The Amstrad CPC.
While the computer launched in 1984 in the UK by British electronics company Amstrad, the CPC was incredibly popular in the UK, Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and of course France.
The game distributed on both cassette (the most common form of data storage in Europe at the time), and floppy disk. One thing to note is that the Amstrad CPC didn't use standard 5.25 or 3.5 inch floppy disks, they used 3 inch disks. These were originally designed in Japan by Matsushita (also known as Panasonic in the west), and Amstrad were keen on the format using it in most of their computers.
The plot of the game loosely follows the movie, you control four protagonists - Patrick, Yannick, Sylvie, and Alexandre all of whom named after the creators of the game, exploring a zombie-filled shopping mall, gunshops, escalators, and the articulated trucks used to block the entrances. the goal for the game is to search the mall to find gas for your helicopter to escape all while avoiding zombies and a biker gang.
The game is essentially a point and click adventure game, you have icons for things like entering vehicles, interacting with objects, and eating, drinking and sleeping. However, being from 1986 and since the CPC didn't come with a mouse, it uses the keyboard and the joystick. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well, especially since the instructions aren't very well documented.
There are a couple of neat features, such as controlling the four characters. Although you're controlling four of them, you'll need to constantly switch between two of them in the basement segments as one needs to hold a flashlight while the other shoots the zombies and if one of them dies you'll need to their zombie.
Another thing of note is that the English translation isn't the best, and despite the game is supposed to take place in the US, most of the store signs and adverts are still in French.
While we're on the topic of visuals, the graphics are very basic. The Amstrad CPC uses the Motorola MC6845 CRT controller chip, the same chip used in the BBC Micro, the Videx VideoTerm display cards for the Apple II, the later versions of the Commodore PET, and graphics cards for the IBM PC, including the MDA, Hercules, and CGA.
The 6845 chip provided a palette of 27 colors with three official resolutions, a low-res 160 by 200 with 16 colors and a 20 by 25 text resolution, a medium-res of 320×200 with 4 colors and a 40 by 25 text resolution, and a high-res 640 by 200 with 2 colors and a 80 by 25 text resolution.
The problem was that they were very hard to program, so they never really got implemented very well in games, However did look impressive when they did. Not really much of a problem in this game since detail is more important then color.
Same goes for the sound, which is generated by a General Instrument AY-3-8910 sound chip, which was also used in a variety of arcade machines, pinball machines, video game consoles and home computers such as the Intellivision, the Vectrex, the Atari ST, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128, the MSX range of computers and the Mockingboard and Cricket sound cards for the Apple II.
The AY-3-8910 generates three channels and seven octaves of either mono or stereo squarewave audio or white noise. While the AY-3-8910 was a decent sound chip for the time, and can produce some fantasic chiptunes, in Zombi the sounds are very minimal, which is fine considering the game doesnt need anything that complex for sound.
So what did critics think about Zombi? Answer, they loved it! Amtix, an Amstrad CPC dedicated magazine from the time, gave it a score of 93% stating: "Zombi is a superb game that deserves to do well."
In 1990, The game was re-released, with ports developed for other 8bit computers of the time such as the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and DOS.
It was also released for the Amiga and Atari ST, which not only include enhanced graphics and sound, but also since they both machines included a mouse, the game includes a simplified control system.
So there you have it, a look at the story of Zombi, a forgotten point and click game inspired by a sequal to an influential horror film, that came out in europe that not got Ubisoft on the road to become the publisher it is today. Hope you enjoyed my look at it, and ill see you next time!
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