Reflecting on the Zombie Game Genre in 2019

Originally Published February 23rd, 2019

With the recent release of Resident Evil 2’s remake, and with the quickly approaching Dying Light 2 and Days Gone, we’re seeing the reanimation of the declining zombie game concept after almost a decade. The surge in popularity of the genre started when “The Walking Dead” premiered on AMC and brought with it the Telltale series, but it first found its roots in the mid-to-late 2000s, when the Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead franchises released. The trend seemed to begin to wane around 2014, with fewer and fewer titles seeing the light of day, so why the resurgence now? The truth is, zombie games haven’t been dying, they’ve just been lying dormant. You know, like zombies.

Killing zombies is far from a new concept, though, and the pastime is certainly older than the zombie apocalypse genre that saturated the market with brains just a few years ago. The oldest notable release was Ghosts and Goblins, which saw launch on the Commodore 64 and NES, and was worthy enough to be included on the NES Classic that released in late 2016. After Ghosts and Goblins’ debut, other games with similar concepts started to emerge, like DOOM and Resident Evil in the early to mid 90s. It was these two games that really drew people into the genre, unless you were an arcade nut and preferred something like SEGA’s The House of the Dead, and it was because they were popular enough to spawn their own series.

DOOM and DOOM 2 were extremely popular on Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS, selling over two million copies total back when computers were often one per household. Despite the franchise name, DOOM 3 failed to capitalize on the success of its predecessors, and mediocre gameplay and forgettable environments forced the series into dormancy until the DOOM reboot in 2016.

The hugely popular Resident Evil series has also seen a dip in continuity and cohesion over the years. It seemed like the games were getting better and better back during its peak in the early 2000’s, but then Resident Evil 5 happened. The series was losing its identity, and even though Resident Evil 7: Biohazard saw both critical and financial success in 2017, it made long-time fans a little confused about where the series was going.

So, zombie-centric plots have always been around, they just keep dying and coming back. The genre is popping up in 2019 because of hype for Dying Light, Days Gone, and Day Z, but the reason doesn’t lie in nostalgia or an established franchise; it does so in technological advancement. Development on Dying Light 2, Days Gone, and even The Last of Us: Part 2 are mostly based in a few things: choices, an open world, and hyperrealism. For a game to be drastically changed every time the player makes a decision, a lot of disk space is needed, which was more limited in the days of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Open worlds were hard to optimize with older hardware, which is why games that attempted and succeeded with it, like Grand Theft Auto 4, Red Dead Redemption, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim saw overwhelming success. Now we see them popping up left and right, mostly because of evolved game hardware. The same goes for hyperrealism; zombies can look more gruesome than ever on new hardware, and fear can be expressed on character models with much more authenticity than what was possible with previous game technology.

It was the possibilities that game developers of zombie games saw in systems like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X that led to this return of big budget, zombie-centric titles. Just as entertainment creators and console manufacturers are always looking toward the future of their medium, game developers are doing the same. So it’s not just that zombie games are making a return: they’re also going to be better than ever because of the ambitious minds that make them.