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Whether the cause of their appearance comes from post-nuclear fallout, a government created experiment gone wrong, an evil pharmaceutical company, aliens, or Hell simply having no more boarding room, the living dead will continue to be a threat. Zombies crave one thing and one thing only: to sink their rotting teeth and claws into the succulent flesh of the living in an attemt to 'chow down' on delicious brains. The classic portrayal of a zombie is that of a slow, shambling corpse lurching tirelessly forward, however, zombies have been imagined in many different forms including the nimble killing machines of 28 Days Later, the intelligent-otherworldly-inhabitant-that-invades-a-dead-body-and-kills-stuff creatures from Brian Keene's novels, and animals of various forms like the zombie dogs in Resident Evil.
Some of the earliest games to include are Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Castlevania, Ghosts and Goblins, and Zombie Nation. In Wolfenstein 3D: Operation Eiesenfaust you fight your way through an army of zombies created by Dr. Schabbs. Doom took the same mechanics as Wolfenstein and took it one step further taking you all the way to Hell to fight zombies there. Side-scrollers Castlevania and Ghosts and Goblins had plenty of zombies to whip or throw daggers at. Zombie Nation, perhaps the strangest zombie game ever made, had you play as a floating zombie head that uses vomit and eyeballs to fight against legions of zombies. The SNES saw zombie success with Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Sega had perhaps the first game to use full motion videos for their light gun shooter Corpse Killer. Corpse Killer was also one of the games shown to Congress along with Mortal Kombat in an attempt to create a ratings system for games.
House Of The Dead / Typing Of The Dead / Touch The Dead
Sega took the idea of Corpse Killer and developed further into the form of the House Of The Dead series. House of The Dead is an arcade light-gun shooter which had you shooting your way though haunted houses, killing zombies and every type of creature imaginable even zombie frogs. The House Of The Dead games allowed you to stand side by side with a friend to fight of the shambling hordes. The T yping Of The Dead similar to the House Of The Dead series had you typing words to blast away at the legions of undead. While Touch The Dead took the light gun shooter genre and lost the gun, instead of pointing a gun at the screen you tagged the zombies with a stylus on the DS touch-screen.
Resident Evil
Perhaps the most popular zombie game franchise is Resident Evil. In Resident Evil 0, 1, 2, 3, Code Veronica you play as various members of S.T.A.R.S. as you fight your way through zombies trying to uncover a conspiracy by the Umbrella pharmaceutical company. Resident Evil 4 gives you a change in scenery when you go to a small village in Spain to rescue the President's daughter. The zombie characters in RE4 are a different breed of zombie known as Los Ganados. The characters become a Ganado when they are infected with a parasite called Las Plagas a parasite that controls the host in every way, thus turning them into a zombie. Resident Evil 5 also features a variation of Las Plagas, in a slightly more advanced state.
Dead Rising
A recent zombie title is Capcom's Dead Rising. The setting is very similar to the George A. Romero movie Dawn Of The Dead featuring zombies in a shopping mall. In Dead Rising you play as photographer Frank West who is investigating a town where nearly all of the inhabitants have been turned into zombies. Dead Rising has the largest amount of zombies on screen than any zombie game in the genre.
Halo also takes the zombie idea but put an interesting spin on it in the form of The Flood. The Flood attacks with small creatures and it infects anything it comes in contact with by burrowing into the host's spinal cord. It does not differentiate between a Human
Marine or a Covenant Elite. Zombies also slowly shambled their way into Halo multiplayer. Zombies first appeared in Halo 2 as an honor rules gametype where players spawn with shotguns and energy swords. The humans could only use shotguns, and the zombies could only use swords, but whenever a zombie killed a human, they had to switch to the zombie team. Zombies proved popular enough in Halo 2 custom games that Bungie built the gametype into Halo 3, calling it "Infection".
Honorable Mentions
The Mortal Kombat series even took one of its most beloved characters Liu Kang and said "Let's kill him off and turn him into a zombie." .So they did.
While most tend to recognize the zombie as a horror or disaster movie staple creature, few seem to agree on the particulars. Zombies have a rather deep and varied history in popular culture, beyond the Caribbean and African folklore that may have given rise to the myth of the zombie-like undead in the first place.
Zombies now seem to have migrated quite far from their roots, although in general culture you can still see zombie referred to more as an alternate driving force in living people, rather than something that animates the dead. The Serpent and the Rainbow is a good example of a film which sticks closer to the old tales (which often suggest that it is a living person put under a spell or controlled in some way that leads to their becoming a zombie).
In some traditions, even passing out is considered to be the loss of your soul, and that when you awake you are some other thing, inhabited by an evil spirit. It's not that the body is dead, then, it's that the mind is dead. Actually, the Rage Zombie movement of recent decades actually pays more of a homage to this origin than the preceding films, the latter of which pay more attention to the fact that these zombies are undead. Even Romero's satirical elements of consumer culture in Dawn of the Dead could be said to be more about the real world's mindless zombie-ism rather than the folkloric rising of the dead. In a sense, the terms undead and zombie can, in some interpretations, be mutually exclusive terms!
Since this isn't meant to be an exhaustive article, it may be best to narrow down the discussion to a few of the touchstones that people keep coming back to when defining what zombies are. Undeath will, for the purpose of general context, be closely linked to zombies, despite the afforementioned potential divergences.
The Film that Raised a Thousand Corpses
While there were films that predated it, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is often cited as the most influential zombie horror film. The zombie it established has since been modified or outright rewritten, but there are many that cling to Romero's version of the undead as the truest. For the purposes of this discussion we'll use Romero's seminal film as the basis for the definition of a zombie; yet even Romero stalwarts sometimes mistake Romero's zombies for others' creations. Below is a list of traits that are usually used to define a zombie, along with their possible pop-cultural influences.
Speed
In zombie debates one of the first aspects that comes up is a zombie's speed. As with all mythological creatures, the zombie has its strengths and weaknesses, and speed is often considered one of its biggest weaknesses. Usually the traditional zombie is ascribed to be slow and stumbling, barely able to move its stiff limbs as it ambles about. What's surprising is the variance with which even the supposedly traditional zombie movies.
For instance, in the original Night of the Living Dead, the very first zombie shown actually breaks into a run, albeit awkward and staggering, toward its prey. She is able to only barely escape, suggesting that despite her relative speed, the zombie was not much slower than she was. Most of Romero's zombies, when presented with potential food, tend to break into a sad little canter, though they are usually still easily outrun.
Dispensing with such assumptions, the remake of Dawn of the Dead, as well as entries in the newer Rage Zombie phenomenon featured in such films as 28 Days, have zombies running toward their prey, though some would argue that many of these examples begin to fall outside of what is considered traditional, especially the Rage Zombie.
Intelligence
The traditional zombie tends considered to be almost animal-like in intelligence, driven only by hunger or the desire to kill. Zombie intelligence, though, actually tends to vary quite a bit. You could come up with in-universe explanations for this, but it seems that a given zombie's intelligence seems to grow to fit the requirements of the story, and this includes many of George Romero's films.
In Romero's original Dawn of the Dead, many of the zombies have an instinctual connection with the recognizably human, if mindless, pastime of shopping. In Day of the Dead, a zombie is trained through negative reinforcement to use weaponry in an attempt to use it against its fellow zombies. In Land of the Dead, zombies begin to develop pack-like mentality, with alpha zombies exhibiting the ability to adapt to situations, albeit much slower and less complete than most intelligent humans could do.
The Rage Zombie movement often includes zombies that are a lot more willful and deliberate. It seems that only their overwhelming rage prevents them from more adaptive behavior.
The Cause of Undeath
Are the spirits of the deceased animating these corpses? Is there some biological process we don't understand animating them? Is there no way of figuring it out? Is this some twisted interpretation of the biblical rise of the dead that no one foresaw?
Often the question is never properly answered, and many storytellers would argue that it shouldn't be, as the mystery helps drive viewers further into the story.
The Spread of Undeath
One break in the skin during a zombie attack is all it takes in Romero's universe, as well as being dead in the first place. In others its long-term exposure to the contaminant, along with a susceptibility to its effects, like you see in Night of the Comet. For others it's listening to a signal.
If you have a wound be the vector for undeath, you will seriously drop the survival rate of your universe, so depending upon the requirements of the story, this one-wound-one-zombie rule is sometimes ignored for the sake of the protagonists.
The Nature of Undeath
Does the body slowly rot, or is it preserved through the same process that animates it? How can muscles move if they no longer get oxygen pumped by the heart?
Often the nature of undeath, as the cause, is never fully explained. Again, this drives the story foreward, but unlike origins, it is often a lingering question in the reader or watcher's mind. What level of decay would there need to be for the zombie to cease functioning? You could consider a hail of bullets a form of decay, really, so why does that work when natural processes don't?
Often biological causes are cited as the reason cellular decay doesn't stop them; the zombies are somehow reanimated through augmentation. Supernatural forces work too, although this explanation doesn't seem as satisfactory to audiences as it once was.
The Hunger
Zombies eating brains was actually a more recent development. Romero's zombies just wanted any old living human's meat. Return of the Living Dead is what started the specific brain fetish among zombies, and the idea that they could lay into your most important nervous bundle struck a chord with people so that even Romero's walking corpses are often attributed the "brains" mantra, even though they never uttered it.
Depending on the film, Rage Zombies are often suggested to be there to simply murder others. While some eat flesh, others are just there for the killing, making them especially fearful predators who don't really bother to stop for a snack.
Disposal
Romero's zombies followed the song "Shoot them in the brains, if you want to live." Return of the Living Dead had zombies be a lot more invincible than Romero's. They seemed more able to move about despite lacking the muscles to do so should they be fragmented into little bits or severely decayed to the point that they were just tendons, skin, and bones.
Usually no matter what, some severe incapacitation is needed, often meeting or exceeding what one would need to do to take down a living human being.
Conclusion
Zombies are one the requisite stand ins for guilt-free murder in modern culture. If you kill a person who is already firmly established to no longer be a person anymore, you're able to get rid of that desire to murder others in a safe venue. It's no wonder the zombie is popular among us geeks, as it allows a chance to let loose some pent-up aggression without feeling guilty afterwards.
The strange part of this formula, though, is that the more you define how a zombie differs from a human being, the more it comes off as defensively hiding this guilty pleasure. It seems like the best tactic is just to let the zombies be, and focus on the human relationships in a given story. The more human you make a zombie, the more you have to deal with their behavior, and the bigger the character they become. This is a delicate balance. Too inhuman, and zombies become little more than a rather unusual element in a disaster movie. Too intelligent, and you have to wonder just what it is you're killing (though that can be deliciously disturbing).
Zombies truly are a modern folkloric staple, even if people don't tend to think of them as real things. They have a life of their own, in a way, as shown by each person often having a completely different concept for what makes up a zombie, assuming their interpretation is right despite no actual zombies existing. Perhaps this is the nature of most folklore in modern times; it is treated with both tongue-in-cheek humor and minutely detailed seriousness in discussions about them.
A term used to describe the walking dead. They feed largely on the flesh of the living, but are sometimes depicted as craving brains specifically. They often move slowly, due to rigor mortis, but are extremely deadly in large numbers. Unfortunately, they're always found in groups. Shotgun time!
Overview
Whether the cause of their appearance comes from post-nuclear fallout, a government created experiment gone wrong, an evil pharmaceutical company, aliens, or Hell simply having no more boarding room, the living dead will continue to be a threat. Zombies crave one thing and one thing only: to sink their rotting teeth and claws into the succulent flesh of the living in an attemt to 'chow down' on delicious brains. The classic portrayal of a zombie is that of a slow, shambling corpse lurching tirelessly forward, however, zombies have been imagined in many different forms including the nimble killing machines of 28 Days Later, the intelligent-otherworldly-inhabitant-that-invades-a-dead-body-and-kills-stuff creatures from Brian Keene's novels, and animals of various forms like the zombie dogs in Resident Evil.
The Early Years
Zombie Nation
House Of The Dead / Typing Of The Dead / Touch The Dead
Sega took the idea of Corpse Killer and developed further into the form of the House Of The Dead series. House of The Dead is an arcade light-gun shooter which had you shooting your way though haunted houses, killing zombies and every type of creature imaginable even zombie frogs. The House Of The Dead games allowed you to stand side by side with a friend to fight of the shambling hordes. The T yping Of The Dead similar to the House Of The Dead series had you typing words to blast away at the legions of undead. While Touch The Dead took the light gun shooter genre and lost the gun, instead of pointing a gun at the screen you tagged the zombies with a stylus on the DS touch-screen.
Resident Evil 
And so it Begins...
And so it Begins...
Perhaps the most popular zombie game franchise is Resident Evil. In Resident Evil 0, 1, 2, 3, Code Veronica you play as various members of S.T.A.R.S. as you fight your way through zombies trying to uncover a conspiracy by the Umbrella pharmaceutical company. Resident Evil 4 gives you a change in scenery when you go to a small village in Spain to rescue the President's daughter. The zombie characters in RE4 are a different breed of zombie known as Los Ganados. The characters become a Ganado when they are infected with a parasite called Las Plagas a parasite that controls the host in every way, thus turning them into a zombie. Resident Evil 5 also features a variation of Las Plagas, in a slightly more advanced state.
Dead Rising 
Dead Rising
Dead Rising
A recent zombie title is Capcom's Dead Rising. The setting is very similar to the George A. Romero movie Dawn Of The Dead featuring zombies in a shopping mall. In Dead Rising you play as photographer Frank West who is investigating a town where nearly all of the inhabitants have been turned into zombies. Dead Rising has the largest amount of zombies on screen than any zombie game in the genre.
Halo
Halo also takes the zombie idea but put an interesting spin on it in the form of The Flood. The Flood attacks with small creatures and it infects anything it comes in contact with by burrowing into the host's spinal cord. It does not differentiate between a Human
OH MAN. ZAMBEES.
Honorable Mentions 
Something's different about Liu Kang...
Something's different about Liu Kang...
The Mortal Kombat series even took one of its most beloved characters Liu Kang and said "Let's kill him off and turn him into a zombie." .So they did.
Pop-Cultural Influences
Zombies now seem to have migrated quite far from their roots, although in general culture you can still see zombie referred to more as an alternate driving force in living people, rather than something that animates the dead. The Serpent and the Rainbow is a good example of a film which sticks closer to the old tales (which often suggest that it is a living person put under a spell or controlled in some way that leads to their becoming a zombie).
In some traditions, even passing out is considered to be the loss of your soul, and that when you awake you are some other thing, inhabited by an evil spirit. It's not that the body is dead, then, it's that the mind is dead. Actually, the Rage Zombie movement of recent decades actually pays more of a homage to this origin than the preceding films, the latter of which pay more attention to the fact that these zombies are undead. Even Romero's satirical elements of consumer culture in Dawn of the Dead could be said to be more about the real world's mindless zombie-ism rather than the folkloric rising of the dead. In a sense, the terms undead and zombie can, in some interpretations, be mutually exclusive terms!
Since this isn't meant to be an exhaustive article, it may be best to narrow down the discussion to a few of the touchstones that people keep coming back to when defining what zombies are. Undeath will, for the purpose of general context, be closely linked to zombies, despite the afforementioned potential divergences.
The Film that Raised a Thousand Corpses
While there were films that predated it, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is often cited as the most influential zombie horror film. The zombie it established has since been modified or outright rewritten, but there are many that cling to Romero's version of the undead as the truest. For the purposes of this discussion we'll use Romero's seminal film as the basis for the definition of a zombie; yet even Romero stalwarts sometimes mistake Romero's zombies for others' creations. Below is a list of traits that are usually used to define a zombie, along with their possible pop-cultural influences.
Speed
In zombie debates one of the first aspects that comes up is a zombie's speed. As with all mythological creatures, the zombie has its strengths and weaknesses, and speed is often considered one of its biggest weaknesses. Usually the traditional zombie is ascribed to be slow and stumbling, barely able to move its stiff limbs as it ambles about. What's surprising is the variance with which even the supposedly traditional zombie movies.
For instance, in the original Night of the Living Dead, the very first zombie shown actually breaks into a run, albeit awkward and staggering, toward its prey. She is able to only barely escape, suggesting that despite her relative speed, the zombie was not much slower than she was. Most of Romero's zombies, when presented with potential food, tend to break into a sad little canter, though they are usually still easily outrun.
Dispensing with such assumptions, the remake of Dawn of the Dead, as well as entries in the newer Rage Zombie phenomenon featured in such films as 28 Days, have zombies running toward their prey, though some would argue that many of these examples begin to fall outside of what is considered traditional, especially the Rage Zombie.
Intelligence
The traditional zombie tends considered to be almost animal-like in intelligence, driven only by hunger or the desire to kill. Zombie intelligence, though, actually tends to vary quite a bit. You could come up with in-universe explanations for this, but it seems that a given zombie's intelligence seems to grow to fit the requirements of the story, and this includes many of George Romero's films. In Romero's original Dawn of the Dead, many of the zombies have an instinctual connection with the recognizably human, if mindless, pastime of shopping. In Day of the Dead, a zombie is trained through negative reinforcement to use weaponry in an attempt to use it against its fellow zombies. In Land of the Dead, zombies begin to develop pack-like mentality, with alpha zombies exhibiting the ability to adapt to situations, albeit much slower and less complete than most intelligent humans could do.
The Rage Zombie movement often includes zombies that are a lot more willful and deliberate. It seems that only their overwhelming rage prevents them from more adaptive behavior.
The Cause of Undeath
Are the spirits of the deceased animating these corpses? Is there some biological process we don't understand animating them? Is there no way of figuring it out? Is this some twisted interpretation of the biblical rise of the dead that no one foresaw?
Often the question is never properly answered, and many storytellers would argue that it shouldn't be, as the mystery helps drive viewers further into the story.
The Spread of Undeath
One break in the skin during a zombie attack is all it takes in Romero's universe, as well as being dead in the first place. In others its long-term exposure to the contaminant, along with a susceptibility to its effects, like you see in Night of the Comet. For others it's listening to a signal.
If you have a wound be the vector for undeath, you will seriously drop the survival rate of your universe, so depending upon the requirements of the story, this one-wound-one-zombie rule is sometimes ignored for the sake of the protagonists.
The Nature of Undeath
Does the body slowly rot, or is it preserved through the same process that animates it? How can muscles move if they no longer get oxygen pumped by the heart?
Often the nature of undeath, as the cause, is never fully explained. Again, this drives the story foreward, but unlike origins, it is often a lingering question in the reader or watcher's mind. What level of decay would there need to be for the zombie to cease functioning? You could consider a hail of bullets a form of decay, really, so why does that work when natural processes don't?
Often biological causes are cited as the reason cellular decay doesn't stop them; the zombies are somehow reanimated through augmentation. Supernatural forces work too, although this explanation doesn't seem as satisfactory to audiences as it once was.
The Hunger
Zombies eating brains was actually a more recent development. Romero's zombies just wanted any old living human's meat. Return of the Living Dead is what started the specific brain fetish among zombies, and the idea that they could lay into your most important nervous bundle struck a chord with people so that even Romero's walking corpses are often attributed the "brains" mantra, even though they never uttered it.
Depending on the film, Rage Zombies are often suggested to be there to simply murder others. While some eat flesh, others are just there for the killing, making them especially fearful predators who don't really bother to stop for a snack.
Disposal
Romero's zombies followed the song "Shoot them in the brains, if you want to live." Return of the Living Dead had zombies be a lot more invincible than Romero's. They seemed more able to move about despite lacking the muscles to do so should they be fragmented into little bits or severely decayed to the point that they were just tendons, skin, and bones.
Usually no matter what, some severe incapacitation is needed, often meeting or exceeding what one would need to do to take down a living human being.
Conclusion
Zombies are one the requisite stand ins for guilt-free murder in modern culture. If you kill a person who is already firmly established to no longer be a person anymore, you're able to get rid of that desire to murder others in a safe venue. It's no wonder the zombie is popular among us geeks, as it allows a chance to let loose some pent-up aggression without feeling guilty afterwards.
The strange part of this formula, though, is that the more you define how a zombie differs from a human being, the more it comes off as defensively hiding this guilty pleasure. It seems like the best tactic is just to let the zombies be, and focus on the human relationships in a given story. The more human you make a zombie, the more you have to deal with their behavior, and the bigger the character they become. This is a delicate balance. Too inhuman, and zombies become little more than a rather unusual element in a disaster movie. Too intelligent, and you have to wonder just what it is you're killing (though that can be deliciously disturbing).
Zombies truly are a modern folkloric staple, even if people don't tend to think of them as real things. They have a life of their own, in a way, as shown by each person often having a completely different concept for what makes up a zombie, assuming their interpretation is right despite no actual zombies existing. Perhaps this is the nature of most folklore in modern times; it is treated with both tongue-in-cheek humor and minutely detailed seriousness in discussions about them.
Zombie games
Edit
| Concept Name: | Zombie |
| Appears in: | 340 games |
| First appearance: | The Evil Dead |
| Aliases |
Animated Corpse Walking Dead Zombies |
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