Saturday, September 10, 2011

Dead Creativity

So with the recent release of yet another zombie game, "Dead Island", I've noticed a naming trend in this whole zombie genre that I honestly feel stupid for not noticing much much earlier.  See if you can figure it out.

Notable Zombie-Related Titles:

Left 4 Dead 


Dead Rising


Dead Space


Dead Island 



Notice anything similar?  Seems to me like the naming committee for zombie titles these days just have to write the word "dead" on a piece of paper, and just pretty much see where it goes from there in order to get the final title.

Not to simply end this article with a stupid observation countless people have most likely made already, I found another less-obvious connection between these similarly named games. Despite what may be implied in their titles, none of these games actually feature the classical "walking dead" type zombies.  The zombies featured most prominently in Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" films were literally supposed to be WALKING CORPSES!  Thus, the only zombies that can be classified with the word "dead" in the name are these type of zombies, which are all noticeably absent in every single freakin' title listed above!

Instead, they give us these shitty "modern" zombies, who are all just regular people with some advanced form of rabies, alien virus, or some other form of infection.  None of which, I might add, are terminal.  So not only are these zombie-game titles cliche and uninspired, but they are just downright LIES!  If you're not going to feature any DEAD zombies in your videogame, then don't go around putting DEAD in the title.  It's not like titles are hard to come up with anyway.  Hell, I could come up with much better, much more TRUTHFUL titles for all these games off the top of my head.  Ready?

GO TRUTH MACHINE!


Left 4 Pissed-Off Rabies Victims


Mutant-Wasp-Larvae Rising


Alien-Virus-That-Turns-You-Into-Mutant-Bugs in Space


Pissed-Off Rabies Victims (Again) on an Island



Now you know the truth.  And knowing is half the battle.