Zombies.
Well, hello there, dear reader! Today I feel like my brains are kinda scattered, so I decided to speak about a subject that was eating at my mind.
The zombie, walker, undead and so many other names for a reanimated corpse is, indeed, a mainstay of popular culture. Books, music, movies, games, all have dabbled with the clichee of the zombie. But why does our friendly neighbourhood walker keep ppoping up in our favourite forms of entertainment? Well, my friend with warm flesh, one of the answers is the fact that violence against a dehumanized enemy is considered a lot more acceptable than against nuanced human beings. An undead is an abomination of nature, a monster, and its only objective is to arrange a meeting between its maw and your delicious flesh. You want to see it dead, smashed to bits. You want to cause suffering to this creature, although it can not feel anything.
Another answer to the question is the fact that the concept of zombies facilitates hordes, meaning that you can get a spectacular amount of foes on display without it feeling ridiculous. Also, it is enough to have a rampant zombie in the entire world to start an outbreak, generating armies of darkness all around.
Ok, I have dabbled on the general concept of the flesh eaters, but what about video games? The first recorded apparition of a game containing zombies dates back to 1982, when a game called Entombed was released on the Atari 2600. Since then, almost every year there was at least one zombie game released, feeding the clichee of the walker. It should not go without notice that there were good zombie games, like Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, Stubbs the Zombie, but there is a stupid amount of them out there, dragging the concept of a walking corpse, ironically, to a creativity grave. Let's play a little game: I will write a few very general, two word descriptions of zombie games and your task is to identify them. Let's start: tropical zombies, parkour zombies, coop zombies, writing zombies, mall zombies, space zombies, mmo zombies. Pretty descriptive, am I right?
All in all, it seems thatt corpse walkers will linger in our fiction for a pretty long time, mostly because they are easy to write and also morally bankrupt targets on which anyone can vent their frustration (personally, I can see three other types of character which can fit that description, but I'll let you guess what they are).
Testing the "if it's got a chart in it" theory? :D
Man, it's been years since I tried playing Stubbs, last time it was hard crashing the PC because the engine was fundamentally incompatible with current tech. I wonder if it's been community patched or something.
Yep, that is exactly what I am doing right now XD.
Also, I do not know if Stubbs was ever patched by anyone. We can just wait and hope that one day the game will pop up on GOG.
@originalworks