RPS: Can you elaborate on your vision of zombies? What are you trying to evoke in the game? What kind of things have influenced you?
Brian Mitsoda: On paper, our zombies are really not supposed to be threatening. They’re dumb, they’re slow, they’re unorganized – your very basic shambling corpse. They’re only dangerous when you forget about them. Make too much noise, get cornered, ignore them – that’s when they get dangerous. Most games deal with a Night of the Living Dead scenario where you have to survive one night, one wave, one map. We’re dealing with a long-term zombie threat, where you have to worry about keeping people fed, friends getting bit and infected while scavenging, and the desperation of other human beings. Honestly, the game is not about the zombies, but about how people react to a crisis and what they are willing to do to other human beings and even members of their group to stay alive or protect their own. The zombies are just a cause, like economic collapse or a massive earthquake, and it’s really the human self-preservation instinct and the survivor mentality that we’re interested in portraying.
I think the interesting thing about a disaster is this mentality that everything is going to be okay – that “someone” is going to come in and save me, of course. This idea that as long as you aren’t in immediate danger, you can keep your head down and hope the problem will go away. We’re short-term thinking creatures and we don’t like to think of the big picture implications of our actions – global warming, borrowing money, cutting education/space spending. I think rationally we want to believe the governments of the world would mobilize quick enough to stop a zombie plague (only infected people rise from the dead in our game) but I think that generally we’re only mobilized when we are directly threatened. By the time people start to notice the dead walking in their neck of the woods, the problem has spread beyond containment. The zombies in Dead State are a faceless (sometimes literally) force and dealing with the zombie problem is a lot like waging a war on an ideal.
